Turning 30 soon

I started writing something about my new obsession with ageing but it was so maudlin and embarrassing. This is my second attempt.

I’ve spent the last few weeks thinking about all the hopes and goals I had at my last milestone birthdays. I definitely haven’t achieved all the grand, self-inflated plans I had for life but 21-year-old me wouldn’t have believed the depths of love and comfort I can feel now.

Sometimes I think about my past self and how there are so many versions of this sad person preserved in people’s memories.

I met Jack just after my 23rd birthday and it marked the end of a terrible year. When I left my first job, the job I had when we met, a senior manager I barely knew whispered in my ear, “I hope you’ll be happier now,” which has always stuck with me. Maybe this person used to see me on the way into work. How did they know?

Covid permitting, Jack and I are getting married in three months’ time. We postponed last year’s wedding, which means my website is under a name I don’t quite have yet. When my insomnia is really bad and my mind’s on overdrive, I look at him and think: how on earth have I got here, how am I so lucky?

In a recent Spanish lesson, I had to show my knowledge of the preterite tense by talking about the best experience of my life. I tried to get Jack to guess what it was, and he couldn’t, because we have done so many amazing, incredible, privileged things together.

My friend Lilli bears the brunt of a lot of my ageing chat because our birthdays are at similar times. She is looking forward to her thirties for maximum fun, she says. I don’t know why I feel so strange about it.

Anyway, here’s to turning 30 in just over a month. My twenties showed me happinesses I didn’t believe existed. May the thirties do the same.