I turned 29 today.
I’ve been saying that in a way it feels like 29 is worse than turning 30. Once you’re thirty, you’re there; your 20s are over and you can look ahead to all those apparent advantages of being in your 30s, knowing yourself and calming down and caring about the right things. But at 29 there’s all the pressure of those things you wanted to accomplish in your 20s and coming to terms with a major period of your life passing.
I came across the New York Times Magazine
piece about 20-somethings and “emerging adulthood” that sums it up:
“The stakes are higher when people are approaching the age when options tend to close off and lifelong commitments must be made. Arnett calls it “the age 30 deadline.” “
I’ve tried not to think too much about my naive teenage assumption that at some point I would meet someone to share my 20s with; that certainly did not work out the way I thought it would. I suppose if I’m being honest with myself, really honest, I also assumed I’d be a mother by now.
“Sociologists traditionally define the “transition to adulthood” as marked by five milestones: completing school, leaving home, becoming financially independent, marrying and having a child.”
By that definition I’m a long way from adulthood.
My 20s have been a mixed bag of highs and lows — from the highs of studying abroad and becoming obsessed with travel and landing a well-paying job I enjoy, to the lows of a couple of years wasted, lost to the pain of endometriosis.
I have two main goals for 29 — to travel to India and pay off my credit card debt. Then there are smaller goals — taking cycle training to be able to use Boris Bikes to get to work and around town, taking French classes at the
Institut Francais, getting into a regular gym routine instead of the half-assed sporadic attempts that have characterised the past year. It feels like chance for resolutions more real than the obigatory New Year platitudes that barely last out the month. To that end, in the spirit of starting as I mean to go on, I took my gym bag to work so I had no excuse not to go this evening. I prefer morning workouts, but since I’m clearly incapable of getting up in time, I’m going to make it a habit of psychologically manipulating myself. I think that also means I’m a long way from adulthood.
But I hope that even as my 20s draw to a close and I leave behind “identity exploration, instability, self-focus, feeling in-between,” I get to keep “a sense of possibilities”.
I can’t quite file this under “quarter-life crisis”. Does this mean its a
one-third-life crisis?
