Hello, Big Three-Oh!
So, I turned 30 a few days ago! To regular readers, I promise this is the last time I will bang on about turning 30. It just feels transformative so bear with me, please. I didn’t want to write this piece until I had actually turned 30 to give things time. And now that I have and my birthday was painless with no crying involved, I'm just going to come right out and say it. It is a bit bizarre to be entering a new decade in the middle of a pandemic. I don't know if that's stupid and I certainly hope it's not self-centred because that’s not my intention. But there is something odd about starting a new chapter amidst all this. Especially when vaccinations were barely around this time last year, no less booster shots or the promise of new pills! Borders were still closed. But now that we are in the opposite end of all these, with some countries even opening up enough to let go of masks, being hit by a new variant yet again just makes it all a touch strange. A sense of uncertainty still looms over our heads. And it's not like I was planning to throw a big party anyway, and feel inhibited by the pandemic as a result. But the uncertainty about venturing into a new decade where life presumably gets more mature (serious) amidst uncertain times, just feels a little… off. There is a small part of me that’s still on survival mode and doesn’t care about any of these but there’s also this part of me that likes to ruminate over seemingly inconsequential things at 2 am. And with this whole new decade thing, it’s the philosophical me that’s taking the reins.
There was a time when I thought 30 was so… old. So adult. So dignified and… proper. This was when I would see the Secondary School students from next door and think they were so cool. I still feel closer to the age when I went “Whoa… an adult” (the way you would look at a mythical creature) even though I look at my Secondary School self and think “God, she was a complete knob.” Even in my late twenties, I thought I would “settle” down at some point. Become a “toned down” version of myself somehow, having been called along the lines of “firecracker” in my early twenties. Now, I really don’t know if I would ever feel like a “proper” adult. Which I am starting to wonder, Like, really. Why should we? Why do we have to lose that sense of wonder that carried us through our childhood? Don’t get me wrong, I understand that age undeniably brings LOADS of responsibilities. The stakes are different, and you can’t see everything without its flaws (e.g., you see now how the movie you loved as a kid has so many sexist dialogues. And to think you idolised it, good God!). But does it have to come at the cost of a certain innocence and optimism you once had about the world? I read this theory about why time seems to pass faster when we are older: imagine if our brain worked like a video camera. There is simply A LOT more visual cues for our brain to pick up on when we were younger so our brain worked like a slow-motion camera. There are a lot more “frames” in one second. Whereas as we get older and get used to more things, classifying them as information we already know and reducing the processing part of things, our brain starts working more and more like a real-time camera or sometimes even in time-lapse mode. So, there are lesser frames in one second now. And you know what crossed my mind when I heard of this theory? Stop and smell the blessed roses already! The people who were coming up with these adages back in those days were on to something! As you get older, you have to actively create these “new” information for your brain to process otherwise life is just going to pass you by! The only way you can slow down time when life goes by so fast is to make the choice to still see magic in the smallest of things. Did that blow your mind? Because it blew mine!
Either way, I don’t know why the world is so ageist. Hearing things like the youngest CEO, Forbes 30 under 30, ground-breaking discovery at sixteen are wonderful and inspiring in their own right. But somehow the effect seems to be counterproductive; a sense of inferiority that perhaps we too should have done the most out of our lives before we hit our thirties. And I understand the concept of “energy” and “vitality” of youth. But why is the ramification of placing deadlines in our youth hearing, “Well isn’t it too late for that now?” when you say you want to learn the drums or something “controversial” to that effect at thirty? Like, whatever the fuck am I supposed to do with the rest of my life then?? Wither away while I await my imminent death? Doesn’t it go that learning is a lifelong process?
External pressures aside (because I’m sure we are familiar with that by now), unlearning internal pressures seems to be a whole other challenge. From being the eldest daughter to being an immigrant or the sole minority in a group setting (i.e., the sole representative of my race), etc., I’ve always experienced some unspoken pressure and heightened awareness to perform. To prove something. Because I’ve always only set out as the extension of something bigger than me. I’ve never quite set out on my own and for that reason, I still feel selfish when I do the smallest possible thing purely for myself. And I’m still unlearning that. I also thought perhaps I would be more accomplished in my career at this time in life; in research or writing. I know my resume looks pretty decent and my blog is not too shabby, but I just feel like I would have it all a touch more “figured out”. And not feel like I’m kind of making it up as I go along. If you ask me where I thought I would be, or what exactly I would like to have done to feel a bit more accomplished, I don’t have an answer for you. All I know is, I see a world where the traditional 9 to 6 is starting to blur and I wish I was a part of that somehow. Like how I see people who are able to start an Instagram page sharing their BuJo spreads, garner enough following and trust that empowers them to quit their jobs and start a business/ Etsy shop/ Patreon account. Which apparently supports them sufficiently (in the financial sense) to work at their own pace and with love. I wonder why that isn’t me. Only at times, not enough to plague my daily thoughts.
As for what does plague my daily thoughts then, that would be wondering if I have done enough so far. If I’m on track. If I’ve wronged my conscience. I think, growing up, it always appeared to me that people just simply move on from things, especially the negative ones. But when I look back at my life and of those around me, I think while some of us are able to identify an abusive or toxic situation, an addiction, a mental health issue, grief, and then remove ourselves from it, most of us tend to identify, remove ourselves from it, sometimes even successfully, only to slip up and go back to the very thing we worked so hard to leave. We don’t simply move on from things; walking away from something is HARD. Trying to define ourselves by something other than the very thing dictating our current narrative is terrifying. And so we push these emotions – no matter, joy, grief, guilt, sorrow, ecstasy, fear, deep aside, and we learn how to work around it. Enough for it to fade from our current narrative but we never move on from it. We go back from time to time to experience them again, just like how sometimes we make the same mistake twice or even thrice – not because we are flawed or we didn’t know better. But because they are simply part of being human. And that is my long-winded way of saying there is no path or track for us to be on. Nothing is set in stone about life. It’s all a product of our choices. And at thirty, I choose to romanticise my life and approach it with as much love as I humanly can because living a life otherwise feels worthless.
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