Ramblings #2

I dreaded turning 30 the way you dread a medical appointment you have been putting off: with a low, persistent anxiety that had less to do with what you would actually find and more to do with the fact that you had decided that the news would be bad. The dread started at 28, which in retrospect is almost comic, two years of anticipatory mourning for a decade that had not yet begun and that I had already (without evidence) convicted of being the beginning of the end of something.

I was wrong in a way that I find almost embarrassing to admit, and that I’m going to admit anyway because intellectual honesty is apparently one of the things that arrives in your thirties along with the ability to say no to things you do not want to do and the mild but genuine pleasure of going to bed at a reasonable hour.

Thirty has not felt like a closing. It has felt, with a consistency that still surprises me, like a clarification. Not wisdom, exactly. I am not wise. But I am wiser than I was two years ago in ways that are specific and measurable and mine: stricter with my time, more honest about what I actually want from other people and what I am willing to offer in return, more capable of sitting inside a difficult feeling without immediately trying to exit it through distraction or performance. The interpersonal relationships I have now are fewer and better. The occupations I give my hours to are more deliberately chosen. The noise has not disappeared but I have gotten considerably better at not confusing it for signal.

There is a version of the turning-thirty essay that ends here, on a note of serene arrival, the narrator having reached a plateau of hard-won contentment from which they survey their past foolishness with fond condescension. That is not this essay, partly because I am not built for serenity and partly because the thing I feel most strongly at 30 is not satisfaction but anticipation. The best days are not behind me as some nostalgia. They are ahead of me, and I intend to be awake for them in a way that I was not always awake for what came before. Proust’s narrator went to bed early for a very long time. So, in my own way, did I. The difference is that I know it now, which is not a small thing. Knowing it is, in fact, almost everything.