Goodbye 29

“I Am Mother.” Self-Portrait, 2023.

I turned thirty this week. Thirty. 3-0. An age I always grew up thinking was old. Thirty was a distant island, where people owned houses, started families, and where women’s sexuality, ambition, and relevance went to die. It was the age when I felt like I had to have it all figured out, an event marked on the calendar: You’re a Grown-Up Now.

Grown-Up. What a misleading word. It implies that once we reach a certain age the growing stops. That by achieving specific things in our lives, we become stagnant, cast in stone, effigies to capitalist success. 

I now know that isn’t true.

I spent my 20s trying to figure out who I am. I tried on and took off different versions of my identity, peeling off layers like a snake shedding its skin. I intentionally faced and unlearned patterns that were causing me harm, accepted my anxiety disorder and learned how to balance it. I’ve unmade and rebuilt myself, this time with a stronger foundation. 

Ten years ago, I made the decision not to go to grad school or pursue a career in academia (a goal I’d had for myself since middle school). I moved to Portland with my now-husband, bounced around several different jobs until I landed in the career I have today. I fell under the lure of social media, believing it could be a quick-ticket escape from my mundane day job (it wasn’t). I honed my craft as an artist, learning through imitating what I saw others do until I said fuck it and started following my own creative voice.

I’ve felt a sureness in my identity that came from five years of intentional personal growth work and therapy. I stood on the precipice of this new decade with my feet firmly planted on the ground. I know myself, I said with a confidence I’d never felt before.

Then I became a mother, and my entire world was thrown upside down.

I realized a few years back that I’d never actually envisioned my life after the age of twenty-nine. I always knew that I wanted to have kids around this age, and my mind swallowed the cultural narrative that once I became a mother, my entire life and identity would revolve around my children. It was only when I started to sense thirty looming on the horizon that I questioned that story. My husband and I had many conversations about how we would continue to support each other’s individual identities after becoming parents. 

What this past year of pregnancy and new motherhood has shown me is that the learning and unlearning of who we are never stops. I’ll be unmaking and remaking myself over and over again throughout my life. It’s not starting over because with each evolution of myself I learn something along the way—and now I know that I can find my way to center. Even though the axis upon which my world turns has shifted, I know I’ll be able to do it again.

As I approached this birthday, I wrote down in my notebook: “I want to do in my 30s everything I was too scared or self-conscious to do in my 20s.” I thought that if this past decade had been about looking back and unlearning patterns, I wanted my 30s to be about doing and living forward. The more I reflect on it though, the more I realize I already have been doing and living forward—it’s in how much I’ve grown and changed these years. And I think the moment I become stagnant in my identity is the moment that living stops. 

I get to continue growing and evolving as a person. I get to remain curious and try new experiences and adventures. I get to explore what motherhood means to me and how to balance this new identity with my previous sense of self. I don’t want to be decided, to think of myself as finished. I’m ever-growing, ever-evolving, and I want to keep living my life that way. 

Do I want to compost some versions of myself that no longer serve me? Yes. I want to release some of my anxieties, to give myself more permission and freedom to act on my curiosities. I want to let go of painful internal narratives that hold me back. But I also want to acknowledge how far I’ve come. I’ve made so much progress and gained so much confidence in the past ten years; twenty-year-old me wouldn’t recognize me today. 

I’ve been thinking lately how when we’re children, we’re like seeds newly planted in the ground. As teenagers we grow into seedlings, still tender and raw. Our 20s are the sapling years, when we really start to take shape as beings. We’re still fragile though, easily buffeted about by a heavy gale.  

I now am entering my tree years. My roots are established and my bark more weathered. I can withstand a storm and am not easily toppled. There is a heartiness to me that wasn’t there before. And with each year that comes, I will grow a little taller, a little sturdier, and my roots will inch deeper. My trunk may change shape or grow a little crooked. I’ll develop knobs and crooks in the bark—but I will always be moving up, reaching my branches year by year closer to the sunlight. 

As long as I’m living, I will be growing.

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I asked on Notes the day before my birthday for advice for someone entering this decade. Here are a few of my favorites responses: