30, dirty and surviving

[30dirtyandsurviving]

Let’s try again..

31st December 2023.

Final day of the year that I turned a new decade older.

Turning 30 never really scared me. I lived in London for 3.5 years with two flat mates, one being my now best friend. She is 3 years older than me and in that time of her right before turning 30 first I watched her thrive and survive. I watched her take a new breath of life. I watched her quit her job, plan her finances and plan out her new business venture. Plan about 4-5 holidays that she would go in this one year alone! Plan the itineraries. Plan the flights, plan the hotels. And ultimately I watched her cancel all of them. Every single one. No one could have ever expected the world to enter a pandemic. Do flight refunds even cover that as one of the reasons for a full refund?.. I watched and listened to all the tears, to all the phonecalls, to all the hold music, to all the frustration. This woman quit her job to travel the world and live her life and the world said hell no.

And then she turned 30.

It was almost like it was perfect timing? She was smiling and laughing it off. She got stuck into her new business with a lot of resistance, but she still kept going. I remember thinking.. Why are you so happy? Everything was ruined and you’re now.. 30. She said being 30, a couple months into being 30, that it’s a new sense of life you get.

I’ll be honest. A week or two before turning 30, I was scared. This sense of impending doom loomed over me. I was in Macau with my family and JJ was in England. This plan to move to Australia wasn’t happening, I wasn’t engaged, I have no children, I wasn’t working. What was I good for?.. (bit dramatic but hey, the feels.)

Then 30 happened. And I remembered my flatmate.

To watch her survive all of that in 2020, and to watch her thrive in the last few years was so inspiring. It made me realise that when we turn 30, we don’t spontaneously combust into a fire of depression and feeling of “failure.” Instead, I look at turning 30, as cliche as it sounds, like closing a chapter on all the shit that went wrong in my 20s.

Being 30s gives me a new decade to mess around with. One where I am hopefully wiser and have learnt from my mistakes in my 20s.

20s is for messing around, messing up, losing friends, making friends, loving people, losing love, understanding boundaries, understanding myself, understanding others. If you don’t mess up in your 20s, how will you learn in your 30s?

And I guess the same could go for 40s… right?

Her first.