Turning 30: Not Really Thriving

Ever since I first saw 13 Going On 30, I believed that turning thirty signalled the dawn of a prime in a woman’s life. Turning thirty would herald a new decade filled with an absolute understanding of how to be an adult. I idolised turning thirty just as I did turning sixteen - pivotal ages for vague and arbitrary reasons. In August of this year, I’ll turn thirty. It’ll be on a random Thursday, and I’ll probably be at work. When I wake up, I’ll still have the same hay fever and crippling fears I did the day before. When I wake up on my 30th birthday, I will still enjoy watching TV shows meant for children and reading young adult fiction books where it’s entirely plausible that a 17-year-old girl can save the world against a totalitarian government.

In the past, I’ve said things like ‘ageing is a privilege’ and espoused nonsense about how I don’t care about getting older even though I undoubtedly do. I care so much that it’s overwhelming. But it felt noble (and a little superior) to say that I didn’t. It was as if caring about getting older would signal to people around me that I am shallow and my thoughts must be solely consumed with worries about crow’s feet, the eternal spread of my midriff and my ovaries and their ceaselessly dying eggs. Then, recently, I realised I would have to keep up the lie for the rest of my life, and that felt like too much commitment. Would I look at banners for my 50th birthday and have to ramble philosophically about the great honour of living a whole life despite the knot in my stomach growing ever-tighter? Would I hover above my graveside as a spirit and hear someone comment on the ‘great age’ I made it to, and even then, even without the leaden weight of my human form, want to scream into the void that getting older was a little bit shit? That potential future felt more intolerable than telling the truth.

The truth is that being thirty comes with a meaning prescribed by society that I am not yet ready to claim. Being thirty will mean that I have finally shed my ability to make immature mistakes without their consequences sticking to me. And perhaps most simply and scarily, being thirty means I have less time left on this planet, and I have to take stock of that. I will never not know how precious time is again. And I don’t want to feel as though I cannot say any of these things because other people have died and never had the chance to reach thirty or because I could die tomorrow morning, and my funeral would consist of people listing everything I never got to do.

Last year, I tried limiting my time on all my social media apps, but I just found myself overriding the timer anyway. Now, I don’t even lie to myself. I’ve turned off my screen time reports. I don’t need that kind of shit popping up when I least expect it. So now I scroll pretty guiltlessly, though not without discomfort. Since turning twenty-nine, I have been inundated with ads for fertility treatments, new contraceptive methods (mainly about natural cycles to help me plan a family, which makes me want to heave and feels uncomfortably Catholic), different bank mortgage interest rates and wedding venues to help me live out a fairytale. This last one is especially ironic as I’m not even in a relationship, but clearly, enough of my mutual friends are getting engaged for it to be a thing. I don’t know if I can count these as subliminal messages because I am entirely cognisant of their impact on my psyche. Far from pushing me to download dating apps and get swiping or set my prescription for the pill on fire, these messages are making me angry. I am angry that my brain, which is so malleable, is being warped, day by day, by these messages. Last night, I found myself looking up how much Botox costs and wondering if I needed laser hair removal to have a chance of looking like Sydney Sweeney in Anyone But You. Then I Googled her and saw that she’s twenty-six and heard myself mutter under my breath ‘of course she is’ as though Sydney Sweeney is personally victimising me with her birth certificate. The problem isn’t having these thoughts - it’s having nowhere to put them. To function around all of this messaging, the anger cannot stay. So, like water boiling into searing hot steam, my rage has resulted in the most horrendous inner tension.

I also feel anger because, though I don’t know for sure, I don’t think that men approaching thirty are getting the same messages shot at them, making moving through life every day into a game of fucking paintball. Are they receiving ads for parenting courses on how to prepare to be the best dad or for pregnancy tests filled with rejoicing couples that look like your age despite still associating a positive pregnancy test with a potential abortion? Do they worry about how they will have it all? Youth, success, parenthood and beauty as they age? Maybe men do. Maybe their worries about receding hairlines and ads for hair transplants and Viagra are as pervasive as my own about sagging flesh and how I’ll face another summer potentially having to wear a bikini. But they don’t seem as angry about it, that much is sure. And we all know why - a man’s identity is separate from his youth, and his value is unchanged with each birthday cake. A birthday party in a pub with his friends is just that - a celebration - and not an indication of the beginning and end of some indescribable era of life. I think, on my worst days, I hate men for this—no man in particular, but men overall and the world they have created. But really, I hate myself for buying into it, for Googling the hair removal and Botox and lying in bed looking up Pilates classes to help tone my stomach; if only I could have a little more self-discipline.

My grandmother did not get married until she was twenty-seven. This fact has never been stated in our family without the additional caveat that she was considered over the hill. On the shelf. All phrases that, as a child, conjured up images in my mind of a desiccating mummified woman who turned to stone little by little once her 25th birthday passed. My aunt was single at the age of twenty-four, and it was at this age that she taught me what a spinster was. Yet, at twenty-seven, my mother had her first child. It is all too easy for anyone to ask me what these other women’s paths have to do with me. Paddle your own canoe and all that. Except, as women, we look to each other for blueprints of nearly every single situation. Sometimes, this is explicit. We ask for advice over mugs of tea or in WhatsApp group chats. More often than not, though, it’s an internal process. Watch and learn; we hiss to the girls who come after us. Watch and learn, and you might stay alive. Watch and learn, and you might even enjoy your life. So we do. As girls, we watched as women held their keys in their hands while walking home, and our mothers always tried to park as close to the supermarket entrance as possible. We watched and learned as the women in our lives fell in love, got married and divorced all by the time we reached adolescence. We scan to see what went wrong. Where her mistake was. We watch other women remove their eye makeup by only swiping the cotton pad upward - avoiding premature ageing is essential, after all. For as long as we can remember, we have measured our maturity, security, and sense of safety from the women around us. So yes, the fact that more and more of my friends are getting married and buying houses does matter and directly affects me. It affects me because whenever a friend reaches a milestone I have not yet conceived of, I grow increasingly misaligned with how I have always lived my life. I have not moved as a pack, moving from primary school to secondary and then to college - yet now, you demand me to not only stand alone but to do so nobly, with my head held high as I proclaim myself in love with my stretch marks and more frequent smear tests? You can fuck right off with that.

The crux is that I have felt most capable of being a woman with strength and joy at one specific moment. Shania is singing I Feel Like a Woman and I am on the dance floor with my friends. I’ve realised that this has more to do with the fact that I am with my friends than I relate to the song lyrics because the woman in Shania’s song embodies a sensuality that I don’t actually feel. I don’t feel like a woman but rather a misguided, overgrown girl. The delusion of the powerful sensation of womanhood on the dance floor is shared by all of us women to some degree. We all take off our heels, go home and face the truth - lives being overworked, undervalued and preyed upon. The power of the moment, though, is that together, as women, we are buying into the collective, temporary truth that to be a woman, to grow into one’s body and heart, is not just powerful but an act done in communion with every other woman that has come before us, stands beside us or is waiting in the wings for us to leave the stage. So, in the spirit of that unity, I will admit that I do not want to turn thirty and face what this next decade might demand of me. I am terrified of failing, of being spoken about behind my back, or even of being used as an anecdote in the future to make some other girls feel better because, look, Jen was unconventional, too, and she seems happy enough. I don’t want to be happy enough - or feel pressure to be grateful for every aspect of my fucking life just because I’m breathing. I want to have a frank conversation with my friends and the world about getting older, and I never want that conversation to end. Mostly, I want to blow out the candles on my 30th birthday cake and know that I will not do this entire rigmarole of mental gymnastics again before I blow out the candles on my 40th birthday cake. Or if I do, if we women are destined to feel our age more acutely than men and this is an awareness that never dies, I want to amplify life’s moments that feel like being on the dance floor with your friends in the moments just before you’re going to hit that ‘Damn! I feel like a woman!’ because that is what it is to honestly look forward to something, to look forward in excited anticipation, not dread, because most days, for better or worse, I am going to feel like a fucking woman.

Until next time,

Jens x