Next Sunday, I will turn thirty years old.

I have no idea what this means really, only that it feels sort of big and at least a little disconcerting. Sometimes I get nervous thinking about it and when I hear the countdown clock ticking, I feel like I’m about to make some commitment I’m not ready for–like I’m marrying into adulthood and I’ve got cold feet. Other times, like yesterday while jamming to Kanye in my car, I think Dude, whatever. Thirty is just a number, and when I wake up on Monday nothing will have really changed.

My disoriented feelings about turning 30 are hard to articulate, but when I came across this artwork by Rafael Verona I thought dude, that’s how I feel.

Just a twenty nine-year-old in the red snowy jungle of life, hanging off branches and…Oh God nevermind.

Anyway, this belief that ‘I don’t really feel thirty’ resurfaces in my mind again and again–looking in the mirror, playing hide and seek with my dog, or while playing Taylor Swift songs loudly on guitar, alone in my living room. But I’m thinking now that sentiment is more an excuse, a denial maybe, of what I’m entering in to. How do I know what 30 feels like? I’ve never been 30 before. Here I am, a week shy of it, and so it follows that for me and my life, this is what 30 feels like. It’s only off because what I anticipated about 30 when I was younger and dumber is far off from the experience I am having now. There’s a lot of ways for a person to be thirty years old, and one is no more essentially 30 than the other.

Maybe it feels off-putting too because I’m growing up in the American culture of avoiding looking our age, of never growing old. This sort of ethos is the basis, I think, behind these campaigns I’m always confronting that say “50 is the new 40” and “30 is new the 20” and there’s no reason we should look like we’re getting older, even though we’re all getting older. Americans, more than other cultures it seems, don’t like the idea of growing old. And so assigning a lesser number to our actual age promotes this mentality that we’re only as old as we look (or feel). And looking less than our age is not difficult to do. We’re surrounded by options, like facelifts and chin implants and chemical peels that burn all our skin off! Not to mention the newer business of Supplemental Testosterone, which is geared toward aging men and is a $2 billion dollar industry now. Even I, feeling angst at the number 30, am trying to excuse it by reassuring myself that I don’t look thirty, as if that really means anything. It’s pretty stupid.

I should be happy to be one year older. I should be especially happy to have survived and officially move past my twenties. A lot of them were exceptionally fun, but there were a lot of mistakes and pain too, often the result of being young and not knowing better. I know that the more I understand and know myself, the easier my life becomes. When I reflect on some of the hardest parts of my life, they were often during periods that I didn’t understand or had forgotten who I was, and being lost like that causes its own type of pain. As cheesy as it sounds, every year I grow older has meant a year of knowing myself better. And being in touch with who I am means understanding my strengths, recognizing my purpose more clearly, and grasping the meaning of my small life in the context of a larger whole. Carving out where and how I fit into reality is one sure way to feel happy and fulfilled. And every birthday means I get a little closer.

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