Usually, my birthday is an uncontroversial event. I may have intense feelings about them as they come up each year, but they’re uncomplicated feelings: feelings of of joy and renewal, new opportunity. New hope.
But this year feels different. I still feel joy, but this birthday’s joy is a joy I’ve had to come around to. My enthusiasm for the future feels curbed and repressed. It’s as if the reality of getting older is finally carrying a heavier weight than it used to. Turning 3X feels like it means something that turning 3O just didn’t.
I’m surprised by this. My life is relatively carefree, and I have plenty to be grateful for. I just got a new job—the same lucrative, competitive reporting job I had been campaigning for for months. I have people to love, and those people love me. I have a roof over my head, a car that gets me from A to B, and a sprawling shoe collection that keeps me warm at night. If things keep going according to plan, I could be a homeowner within a year.
My life is moving forward. But I feel a growing pressure to make sure I live the life that I want to live, not the one that happens for me. Maybe that sounds arrogant. After all, we don’t know what life has in store for us and most of us—including me—are doing the best we can with the cards that we’ve been dealt. The challenges and mild nuisances that I now deal with day-to-day are champagne problems. My problems are a cakewalk compared to the serious issues I dealt with a decade ago. And I’m not being conceited when I say that there are plenty of people out there who would gladly trade their problems for mine.
But I know what regret feels like. I know what resentment feels like. I’ve seen other people grow bitter and cold because their lives turned out in ways that they hadn’t wanted for themselves. They’re the people who never mustered up the courage or discipline to turn things around.
I don’t want to be one of those people. I don’t want to be one of those people living in arrested development. I don’t want to look back and wonder what my life would have been like if I had just put myself out there more and kept believing in love, despite the awkwardness and discomfort. I don’t want to wonder what would have happened to my career if I had just pushed through the rejection and setbacks, if I had just held out a little longer, if I had just sat down long enough to write the book.
I guess what I’m feeling is a newfound understanding of how a woman could get older and feel dissatisfied with her life. Despite all the boxes she checked. Despite the good memories that she had. You feel displaced, even though you’re standing where you’re technically supposed to be. I can feel how lonely that is. How unsettling it is. How much harder it feels to make old friends. To keep old friends. How it gets harder to right the ship the more the years go by.
Does this feeling ever go away?
Mary Jane Could Never 