Will turning 30 make me cease to exist?

things I thought in my 20s

Are you a millennial woman who was raised with the cultural expectation that you’d have kids by the time you’re thirty,

but also with the pressure of a narrative that once you had kids you would cease to exist as free-thinking, independent and autonomous human being with your own identity

because once you became a mom, a mom is all you’d ever be,

and all your friends would stop talking to you

and your entire life would revolve around sacrificing own interests for your children,

so you essentially grew up believing that your life would end at the age of thirty

and you put all this pressure on your young adulthood

thinking it was the only time you had to achieve every goal you’d ever set for yourself,

so you became an anxious, burnt-out perfectionist who constantly feels like they’re falling short

because it’s not possible to reach every dream in your 20s,

you don’t who are yet, your brain hasn’t fully developed,

and every minute that’s ticking down to the big 3-0 feels like years of your life slipping away,

until you’re on the cusp of that birthday,

staring down the barrel of a decade that you never planned for,

asking yourself—

now what?

I felt inspired to share this piece after watching

Keeley Rees

’s fantastic short film on turning 30. Here’s her original post if you haven’t see it yet:

Three Oh No

I wrote this piece a couple years ago when I was 28, realizing that I’d never really envisioned my life after 29. It was just a blank stop in my head, always preceded by the phrase, “and then I’ll have kids.” Now I’m a mom, I realize how untrue this is, but it’s taken a conscious choice by myself and my husband that we wouldn’t let this become my reality. We agreed before I even got pregnant that, no matter what, we would do what we could to ensure I retained my own identity independent from motherhood. It’s been such a relief to find that I am still my own individual person, that being a mom is just one more facet added onto the whole. It hasn’t erased what was already there, even though it’s changed me.

If you’d like to read more of my thoughts on turning 30, here’s an essay that I wrote shortly after my birthday this year: