Today is my birthday. Last year on this day, it was sunny and 70 degrees outside. I'd never experienced that kind of weather on my birthday before. The days afterward in my 29th year followed suit in a similar fashion. A great deal of the past year was like that - an unexpected and very pleasant surprise. This year, as a special 30th birthday present from Mother Nature, the DC area broke the record for the amount of snow in one season with a couple of small storms and three big storms: Snowpocalypse, Snowmageddon, and Snoverkill. In total, 54.9 inches. That's more like it for mid-February.
Thirty is a big age for people. It's the line we draw in the sand for ourselves. "By 30, I will be doing _______." "By 30, I will have _________." "By 30, I will have made something of myself," whatever that means for each of us. I'm not sure I ever had those kinds of tangible expectations. I dreamed of the same things most people dream of: the home, the family, the job. Well aware of how I change my mind so often, I knew better than to be too specific about what those things would look like. Which is a good thing because at 30, I'm still living a nomad's life, still trying to figure out what home, family, and job really look like to me. The only time I freaked out about still not having those answers was after watching "Julie and Julia," in which the character Julie freaks out about not having those answers and cooks her way to 30. Then I remembered that we shouldn't feel something just because a movie tells us to, and I got over it.
Now, at 30, I'm still fumbling along, a little wiser and much happier. The only picture I had of myself as a 30-year-old was that of a confident woman, smart, accomplished, who above everything else, knew herself well. Since I was a teenager, I couldn't wait to be 30 because I so looked forward to knowing myself and feeling comfortable inside and out. Now, I don't care about not being settled down, not achieving whatever measures of success people are supposed to have achieved by this age. Because I achieved the goal I have always seen as more worthy than whatever I could use to measure myself against others. I feel like the woman I always wanted to be. I accomplished the task of growing up, of getting through the wrenching teens and the tumultuous 20s and making it out alive and relatively intact. I wouldn't take back any of what I've gone through in my life, but just thinking about it all makes me exhausted. And that's been just the first 30 years of this wild journey.
So now it's time to do something with it. I still feel lost, as much so as I always have, but maybe that feeling never goes away. At least now I have a compass and I know which direction to head: Westward from here, but never far from myself.
