Finally finding my lane?
I am at an impasse.
Which seems to be the place I feel most comfortable residing in these days. But with just a few days before my 29th birthday, I have been thinking more and more (much to my sleep schedules chagrin) about what I want my last year of my 20s to represent.
I’m aware that I have the option to not think about this at all considering that 29 is going follow the same order of time as my other birthdays. And I also didn’t do this much reflection at 19, which arguably leaving behind your teens is also a pretty big deal. But there is something about this age that is really asking me to pay attention to how it plays out.
There are a lot of reasons I can point to that make me feel that it’s important I take an active role in this age more so than I ever have before. A lot of those reasons will likely reveal themselves as I find more apt ways to write about them. For right now all I will say is that my 20s were not as advertised.
There is such a huge emphasis on the 20s being the greatest time of your life. From what feels like your first sentient moment, all you hear about is how your 20s are going to be so much fun and wild and exciting and filled with nothing but youthful ignorance that no one will blame you for indulging in.
And maybe that’s what it really is like. But it wasn’t for me so maybe I did something wrong? Or right depending on which side of 20 you’re standing on. Instead, somewhere around 25, I latched on to the idea that 30 was the real age I needed to get to. That’s when everything was supposed to make sense and you finally figure out what you want from life. Yet another perpetuation of a specific decade of your life. Who is coming up with this stuff?
Anyway, back to the impasse.
I am about to be standing directly on the equator between “the greatest time of your life” and “the most assured time of your life” and am feeling a lot of pressure to figure out how to stick the landing without falling face first into my 30s. Somewhere along the way, I’ve determined that the key to doing this the “right way” is to treat it like a homework assignment (I liked school, OK).
For all of 29, I intend to focus on the all the areas of my life in which I’ve either neglected in my early and mid 20s or didn’t even consider at all. The core 4:
- Health
- Creativity
- Career
- Relationships (with myself, the others in my life, and God)
so…yeah.
29 is shaping up to either be the best year of my life or the one I end up conjuring up the most gray hairs. We’ll see.