I think the title speaks for itself.
I may as well slap on a birthday cone hat and start counting down the months until I'm graced with thirty candles on my three-layer chocolate cake. Soon, those months will become weeks, then days, then hours, then minutes, then seconds. Before I know it, the big Three-O will be upon me!
Yikes.
Don't get me wrong. It's not that I'm not excited about reaching such a milestone. I'm simply weary . . . and wary. Wary of the next ten years repeating the last ten. Let it be said that I had me some fine ol' times in my early twenties
(also known as the college years). However, a lot of it was spent
making mistakes. It's as if failure and rejection made a pact to make
my life their fertile playground. I'm still carrying on though, but with a darn good heavy load.
When you get to be twenty-nine, you think, "Whoa, how did I get here?!" I still remember when I was in the summer step-up program for high school and the English teacher mentioned she was turning thirty. I didn't say it aloud, but I sure was thinking it: DANG, THAT'S OLD! Mind you, I was only thirteen at the time.
And now look at me--in the last year of my twenties. I thought I would have my life figured out by this point. I had my game plan: graduate from college at 21; spend a year exploring and traveling the world when I was 22; get my career going at 23; meet a man at 24; get married at 25; have kids no later than 26.
Yea, well . . . NONE of that happened.
There were roadblocks along the way--tough ones. I couldn't make my way around them; instead, the only way out was to go through them. And through them I went! With as much faith and courage as I could muster. So believe me when I say it's OK if life doesn't go according to the game plan. If anything, it just makes us more human and our story more interesting (entertaining even).
On that note, we live in a world where we are inundated with material growth. Apparently, material growth equates to personal growth. And at twenty-nine, we are expected to have our life together. We are frowned upon if our paycheck places us in the bottom tax bracket. Eyebrows raise if we decide to go after a non-profitable pursuit. Doors close if we aren't living in a five-bedroom/three-bathroom villa. Cheeks turn if we no longer look like how we did at 23 (yes, I'm talking to all you 5'8" hottie-cake cakes with hottie-cake friends). And as always, lips move if we are still single and living with our parents.
I guess what I'm trying to say is this: life is about as predictable as it is unpredictable. We place so much pressure on ourselves to conform into forthright lemmings. We are temporal. Mere mortals who have been given an indefinite amount of time on earth to do something extraordinary with the person we are. Don't let someone else take that from you. Don't let society take it from you. Unless you're six feet under or ashes in an urn, your story can be rewritten toward the ending you desire.
So here's to our twenty-ninth year! Be purposeful! Make it worth looking back on in a meaningful way. As for turning thirty . . . well, let's see what's in store for us!
(When I began this entry, I had an entirely different subject and purpose
in mind. It changed somewhere amid the letters and spaces and
punctuation marks.)
Day Log Entry No. 2, January 11, 2014
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