A False Sense of Thirty-Year-Old Security
In my early twenties, life was about going out, eating tuna pasta three times a week, trying not to catch a cold from the damp creeping up my walls, replacing my bank card on a monthly basis and regular visits to American Apparel. Privileged I know but that’s not my point.
People were in relationships and people were not. Break ups were as thick and fast as hangovers. Singledom was sexy and casual hook ups were fodder for dinner table chats on a Sunday night. Your career didn’t define you and not having a clue what you wanted to do was perfectly acceptable.
I’m sure there was judgement (there’s always judgement) but not the self-imposed, stress-inducing judgement that I’ve come to know and hate.
I, along with a lot of my closest friends, am turning thirty this year and I think we’d all feel a lot more excited about it if not for the fact that not being in a relationship or having a sensible, secure job at this age sits hand in hand with crippling anxiety, mental self-flagellation and subsequent depression.
Disclaimer: I’m asserting my performer-born right to exaggerate to make my point right now. The situation is not quite this uniform and no one is saying these things out loud.
Or at least, no one is laughing and pointing as I make my way to yet another part-time job to fund my perpetually desperate unemployed-actress lifestyle.
No one heckles my friend as she waits, drink in hand, for her next Hinge date (well, they might but that’s a whole other blog post).
But whether we like (to admit) it or not, this feeling of ‘less than’, of waiting for life to start (because we believe at some deep, underground level that it won’t until we tick off at least some of these self-imposed life milestones) is all around us.
It’s in the water, the avocado on toast, the sunset in engagement posts, in our parents’ eyes and it is laughing. Because we’re listening to it.
It’s making people rush. It’s making them stay in jobs they don’t enjoy. It’s making them go on a third date with a person they don’t fancy, just in case, this time, he doesn’t spend the whole evening talking about his work-out routine. It’s making them invent interesting things to say about their work at dinner parties. It’s making people cry. It’s making people self-conscious. It’s making people anxious.
And it needs to. Fuck. Off.
What is it that we find so wrong about taking a different route? The Chicks sang about it fourteen years ago, when they told us they always have and always will ‘take the long way around’.
Elizabeth Day hammers home on her wildly popular podcast that our failures are simply moments when we learn to ‘succeed better’.
Anyone on social media is hard-pressed to ignore self-affirming messages from wise-beyond-their-years Generation Zers (AKA Florence Given) to not ‘settle for crumbs’, that being single is a good thing and to stop extracting your worth from external validation.
We say it to each other around dinner tables, over coffee and tears. And yet still, I don’t believe that we believe it.
But what if we did? What if we were radical enough to believe that success might be being mediocre at every job you do? That the experience of trying lots of things makes you hardworking, humble, a jack of all trades and… successful?
What if having a string of relationships in your twenties and thirties (and forties and fifties etc.) makes you strong, happy in your own company, self-knowing and… successful?
A friend recently told me that the whole saying is, ‘A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one’. Who the hell benefitted from getting rid of that second half? Let’s bring it back.
We have to start really celebrating success. Not just half celebrating it, not just paying lip service to it, but actually feeling, seeing, breathing success in all its forms. There are multiple ways to be successful. And it’s a mantra that we need to say to ourselves every day.
Turning thirty is a big test on that front. It’s on a pedestal from an early age — thirty — because it’s the age we pin a lot of these pesky milestones on.
Things I thought would be true at thirty when I was twenty:
- I’ll be able to afford to take all my friends to a villa in Tuscany.
- I’ll go to the gym five times a week and have a six-pack.
- I’ll be an incredibly successful actress who knows what they’re doing at work.
- I’ll understand tax.
- I’ll never feel insecure or anxious.
- I’ll understand what the symbols on the washing machine tray mean.
- My life will be completely sorted, and happiness will flow from my nipples as I breastfeed my newborn baby while my perfect husband stares on calmly and adoringly by my side.
What a load of shit.
There I was, hurtling towards the end of my twenties, blindly believing all this sweet thirty-year-old goodness was headed my way.
And here I am, having to un-believe it all in order to enjoy my life and keep my head above water — whilst indiscriminately chucking fabric conditioner at my dirty laundry.
What I know is true is that life is not easy, in a whole kaleidoscope of ways. For some it is harder and systematically unfair but for no one, is it easy. Death, disease, discrimination, disagreement are human afflictions that we all contend with.
That means whether you are married, have children, are Jeff Bezos or not. Life doesn’t become perfect when arbitrary milestones are reached, you just set new ones which come with a whole host of shiny new issues and pressures.
So, let’s not make any more assumptions about how our lives are going to look or be or feel (she says out loud to herself as she writes). Instead of listening to that pesky ‘less than’ feeling, let’s turn his volume down, let’s remember phrases in their entirety, let’s encourage ourselves to truly believe in the multiple realities of success, let’s celebrate getting older and have a flipping (socially distanced) party.
