The last day of twenty-nine. The last day of my twenties.
It’s strange — maybe from the leftover exhaustion from last week and the adrenaline of event planning — but typing those lines brings tears to my eyes.
I have a good bittersweet cry stored up inside me right now. We’ll see when it breaks.
For years I have been professing my readiness to exit this decade. By twenty-seven I was good and done with all the expectations of what your twenties are “supposed” to be. Maybe earlier. The impact of getting married and divorced in my early twenties rippled throughout the decade. Been there, done that, I thought. I would look around at most of my generation and get the sense that I was looking for something different than everyone else.
I’m thinking back . . . and then I’m looking back. I just paused and miraculously found a post on my old Tumblr from this day exactly a decade ago: On A Brief Contemplation On My Last Evening As A Teenager.
That triggered the tears.
Because for as much as I have changed and grown (or like to think I have) in this decade, I am still myself. I wrote:
I don’t really know what I want yet. There’s some kind of fuzzy perfect picture in the corners of my mind – of who I’ll be in five or ten years – but even now, when I want to write it out, I couldn’t say what it looks like. At least I’m moving forwards.
-June 20, 2012
Five years later that would be my theme for the year (2017): Moving Forward.
The closest friends I wrote about in that post — Zia, Jenna, Cara, & Lin — are still my closest friends. Closer, really, in a way that only hardship and time can bond people. God, I am so deeply known by the people I love. What better gift than that on the eve of thirty?
A decade ago I must’ve been writing from my sublet in East Boston, where I lived for a couple of months on an air mattress and without air conditioning. I spent the summer there with Cara and a few other college friends, interning for a magazine publishing company and working at Build-A-Bear Workshop. Lin and Cara recently recounted a memory of my twentieth birthday party at that apartment where we sat on the back porch and drank champagne. I have little to no memory of it, but I loved them then and forever so I know I was happy.
It’s too much to recount a whole decade . . . the lessons, the questions, everything I know about myself and the thousands of things I don’t. I started in Boston, spent six years in Austin, and now I’m planted by the lake in Wisconsin. I started engaged to a boy I loved, married him, left him, and became a wreck until I became myself. I become more myself all the time now. I started understanding myself as a straight girl and now understand myself to be queerer by the year. I love myself all the more for it.
I think of my twenties so differently than the stereotype, but maybe they were pretty par for the course. Fall in love a couple of times. Lose love. Figure out how to have a job. Be good at it sometimes. Bad at it others. Drink too much. Go to a lot of therapy. Pay rent. Learn to save. To invest. Adopt cats. Break friendships, fix them, learn that there are so many ways to love and be loved. Plan a wedding, box up the keepsakes for sad days, then, eventually, throw them all away.
Run a few half marathons. Hike in the woods. See a lot of good movies. Get a lot of tattoos. Play volleyball. Say yes to plans. Sometimes say no. Write. Read. Learn to meditate. Learn how to be alone without being lonely.
Gain weight. Lose weight. Learn not to care about weight so much. Keep learning.
Learn that I have more control over my life than I believe. I can move home. I can stop waiting for people to read my mind. I can tell the truth.
Learn that bad days pass. That seasons pass. That the strength I found in my heart back when I was a teenager is still there, hard as a diamond.
As I look ahead to my thirties I have heaps of hope for what life will bring (family, stories, growth, peace) but I know what I knew ten years ago: I can’t predict the future. The specifics will change. What I want may change. But I’ll wish for myself in ten years what I wished for myself back then (bless that little girl, she got me here):
And for myself I’ll wish the cliches- courage and daring and opportunity and imagination and persistence and strength and happiness. And good books and good TV and good friends and good afternoons and good nights and a few occasional good mornings and things that make me laugh and make me cry and dark chocolate and cheesecake and diet coke and high heels and good runs and meeting someone at the airport and quiet movie theaters with buttery popcorn and bunch-a-crunch.
-June 20, 2012
Goodbye to my twenties. You were tough shit. But you carried me home.
With Love,
Natalie