I turned 30 at the ABBA Voyage show. I smiled, laughed and cried happy, happy tears as four virtual Swedish superstars were returned to their youth and heyday via the magic of modern technology. I stayed on the dance floor for the whole 90 minute concert, swaying and dancing and singing along beside the other attendees, some of who were barely in their teens, others who were in their 60s, 70s, 80s. Age didn’t matter down there on the floor, only the music was important, the songs, the joy of it all. It was a feeling I wanted to bottle and bring with me for the rest of my life.
For the last few years of my twenties, I’d felt nothing but excitement or indifference about turning 30. I was relieved that it didn’t scare me the way it seemed to scare others. When people talked about it as though it was the coming of a great plague I simply couldn’t relate, and though I felt deeply for friends and family members who were worried about their fertility or romantic prospects, I didn’t join them in panic about running out of time to build a family or a certain kind of life. I had no fixed plans for the next decade besides continuing to figure things out, enjoying myself and being glad to see the back of my twenties.
Dread about ageing arrived at the 29th hour. The fondness and gratitude I had been feeling for the journey from 20 to 30 dissipated, replaced by memories of all the difficult times I’d had, playing, and replaying in 4K. Caught up in fears of the future, I forgot all of the lessons I’d learned since becoming an adult, and found I could only focus on the months and years that had been lost to mental illness, to my attempts to understand my mind and its workings and manage the low moods and the dizzying spikes of anxiety.
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From my mid-teens into my mid-twenties, I’d lived with undiagnosed PMDD, a condition that causes severe emotional and physical distress every month in the lead up to menstruation. This, along with unmedicated and untreated ADHD, made it near impossible to keep a steady job or make concrete long-term plans. Staring down thirty, I suddenly felt like it was just another ten-year span that I could fuck all the way up. I wasn’t delightfully aloof about ageing, I realised with horror, I was just unprepared. 30 wasn’t a fresh start or an opportunity for continued growth, it was a trap, an exam I hadn’t revised for, another chance to feel left behind and alone.
“I have shed tears about it.”
I wasn’t alone at all, of course. When I spoke to my close friends, they almost all expressed experiencing some version of the same trepidation. For many it had presented similarly to mine, a bolt out of the blue as the big day drew nearer. For others it was something they’d been dreading for years, seeming to them not an era of wisdom and confidence and new opportunities, but merely a precipice to fall from, the beginning of the end.
In her memoir, The Panic Years, Nell Frizzell explores the period of worry that many Millennial women experience in their late twenties and early thirties, where questions of fertility, finances and romance reach a sudden and often unexpected fever pitch. Faced with social and biological pressures, sexism and parental discrimination in the workplace, a woman’s world can justifiably feel as though it’s narrowing as she reaches 30, despite it being only the second full decade of adulthood.
Though there is still a great way to go in the fight for universal childcare, equal pay, and mental health care for prenatal and postnatal parents, all of the women I spoke to assured me that their less defined fears of turning 30 all but vanished when the year actually arrived. My friends in their 30s and 40s revealed that they feel happier now than they ever have before, more themselves and more fully equipped to handle the challenges of life. Life doesn’t get simpler as it goes on, they told me, but we can all get wiser, more patient, more. Talking to them soothed me, and I was excited to be among their ranks.
Though I’m only newly 30, I’m already finding myself feeling clearer on what it is I want from life. I’m also more able to empathise with (and forgive) my younger self for all the things she had to do to survive and learn to manage her mental health. Though there is great sadness attached to the years I spent barely keeping my head above water, I can look back with gratitude instead of regret. I can see how far I’ve come, how much I’ve learned, and how I’m implementing that learning into my days. I’m finding it easier to know what is good for me long term and what is detrimental and I’m far more able to say no and mean it and to set clear boundaries without feeling intense guilt or needing to backtrack later.
There are still moments when I feel short-changed by my twenties, when I want to go back in time so that I can do things the ‘right way’, skipping past the messy growth part and simply enjoying a slightly younger skeleton, face and brain, but thankfully these feelings don’t last long. I’m wise enough to know that there never really was a right way- just what happened and how I handled it. The present is the only place where I have power or agency, and I’m genuinely finally glad to live there, 30 and flirty and figuring it out.
My emotional and physical battles didn’t cancel themselves out the moment I hit 30, and my mental health will go on requiring focus and time and compassion potentially for the rest of my life. But when I think back on the difficult years in my twenties it isn’t with regret or shame. I’m proud that I stuck around, even when that was incredibly hard to do, even when all I’ve got to show for it is my continued existence on earth. I’m proud that I kept writing, kept reaching towards a future that felt uncertain, kept trying to lay the foundations for a better life even when the tools I had were minimal. With age, life has gotten more full, more enjoyable, more in general. Now that I’m here, being in my thirties doesn’t feel like the end of anything, but rather the beginning of everything.
