The day I turned 11, I cried because I would no longer be the youngest woman ever to win an Oscar.
When I go through my old fiction writing – short stories, plays, skits, etc.-- I can always tell how old I was when I wrote it because I would always make the characters one year older than I was at the time.
I did the same thing playing make-believe (though I prefer to call it ‘doing extended, dramatic improv’) with my friends.
For so so many years of my life, the idea of age had an inscrutable hold on me and the way I saw my self worth. I was desperate, always, to be “young and impressive.” My late nights spent not stalking crushes on instagram (okay a little stalking crushes on instagram) but combing the Wikipedia pages of people whose careers I wanted and doing the math on my fingers to figure out how old they were when they got their big break. To figure out how much time I had to get mine.
Tina Fey was 27. Mindy Kaling was 24. Donald Glover we don’t even talk about.
All this to say: I cannot believe how chill I am about turning 30 tomorrow.
I’ve been checking myself this month, as we start Last Week Tonight Season 10 (Tune in - Sundays at 11ish on HBO!) and as I get ready to release my book out into the world (Please pre-order it!) and as I continue to build a life with the man of and for my dreams while no longer planning a wedding (the only thing better than having one is having had one). I have been checking to see if I am freaking out.
I certainly am. I am freaking out all the time. Truly going bonkers at every turn.
But not about turning 30.
About 3 months ago I was home in Kansas City catching up with my high school teachers and one of them (Junior English) asked me if I was feeling any sort of way about my upcoming birthday. Did I have any complicated feelings about turning the big three-oh?
“I have an Emmy,” I said.
And I clarified (mortified on some level that those words had even come out of my dumb mouth) that it would be objectively self-destructive to descend into any “what am I doing with my life” rabbit hole because I am doing exactly what I want to be doing. Am I content? Of course not. But that’s not because I’m 29 instead of 27 or 32 or 64, it’s because I’m wired to want more! It’s because I’m always thinking about what’s next.
Is that a good thing? Probably not. But it is a true thing. So there’s no reason to beat myself up for existing in linear time when there’s 1) so much to be grateful for and proud of and 2) so much to be anxious and self-flagellating about already.
The other thing I said (because I was blessed with wonderful teachers in school who, even when I am a grownup, offer me a safe and compassionate space to work through my thoughts and feelings) was that too much has happened in the past ten years to make it feel like a fair unit of evaluative time. I lost a “full productivity potential” year to being sick in 2014. Another one to another illness in 2019. And two and a half with the rest of the world starting in March 2020. So in ‘healthy years’ I’m 26. But “healthy years” is a stupid metric of time for a bunch of reasons (not the least of which that it’s not available to MANY MANY people) and if I think of that time being “lost” I’m just going to walk around being angry and resentful and self-pitying and then that time is gonna be lost too!
So tomorrow I’m gonna wake up in bed with my husband (brag) and log on to work at the job of my dreams. I’ll probably panic a few times that I’m not doing enough to promote my book while fielding calls from my family in both English and Spanish. I’ll have a bagel and the rest of my favorite snacks and start eating candy too early in the day and then probably get a headache.
What can I say, I’m not 22 anymore.
Oh man, I feel this so hard. My mom always teases me about the time she found me crying in my room at 12 because I'd just flipped through my diary and realized I was GETTING SO OLD and time was going by too fast! Hope you have a wonderful birthday!!!