On Turning 30
It's official. The old lady years have started.
Today is my 30th birthday.
Okay, so I still have a lot of life to live. The pastor who conducted our pre-marital counseling told me and my husband that life doesn't start until 40, and I am inclined to believe that. Not just because I turned 30 today, but because I have lived through my 20s.
Author John Acuff tweeted a very profound truth when I was in my 20s that I've hung onto:
I was already well into my 20s when he shared this advice, so I knew from experience that this was the case.
My 20s were chaotic.
They had a lot of really great memories, sure. I graduated with both my bachelors and my masters during this time period. I moved out of my parents' house for good. I met, dated, and married my husband. There is a lot I can look back on that decade and really enjoy.
But there was also a lot of mess in there that I would have loved to completely skip through and "get to the good part".
I continued to struggle with my weight and health issues, never really being able to enjoy feeling good in my twenties until the end of the decade. I struggled to find my place and often spent most time working multiple jobs to pay for rent while living at home, health insurance, and trying to figure out what was next while others around me seemed to be having constant fun.
My 20s felt incredibly purposeless. I graduated from college not any more sure of what I wanted to do or who I wanted to become.
I thought by the time I turned 20 or 21, not longer a teen and much more legally free, that I would leave behind insecurity and self-doubt. Instead, they raged harder than they ever did in my teen years.
I moved back home to upstate New York after college and lost the community I had tried to build in my years in Lynchburg. Virginia. Knowing now that I needed to move back home in order to be prepared and in the place to meet my husband, I also cannot deny that it was also an incredibly difficult four and a half years of feeling lonely and without a home. Longing to go back to another state but never being able to get there.
My 20s in some ways have felt like the desert - there were lessons I learned on the journey, but they seemed endless and difficult. I did not achieve what I had expected to by the end of this decade. I had dreamed of being married much younger, already having a second or third child by now, never pursuing my masters but being able to stay home instead. I was single, pursuing my Masters (much to my chagrin), living in my parents' house for much of that time, and still being treated as a teenager by a narcissistic parent.
I did not stay in that place, by the grace of God. And that desert does not need to define this coming decade. This decade I can look back at all the years of mental health struggle, of fighting physically with my body, of wanting so desperately to become a wife and a mother, of not being allowed to be an independent adult-- I can take those lessons and I can now water the seeds of knowing. I can flourish these next ten years and beyond.
My 20s equipped me with the ability to look for help and find counseling to address years of trauma and abuse from my upbringing. My 20s equipped me to speak up when the Western medical system was ignoring my symptoms, and then look to alternative medicine to get a diagnosis and find the treatment naturally. My 20s brought me my husband a little bit later, but with greater equipment to tackle the harder parts of being in a covenant relationship as two sinful people. My 20s have brought me healing in the hopes that when I do pursue motherhood, the process will hopefully not be harder. And it has brought me a degree that I can use to help my future children in ways I might not have been able to with my undergrad. It has shown me the behind the scene dangers and destruction that is happening within the modern public school system--a reality not there when I went through a publicly funded system, and one that I increasingly do not want to subject my future children to.
Beginning my 30s, today, I am equipped to be a much healthier person than I have ever been before. To continue to grow into the Proverbs 31 woman I have prayed to become. I can now make the choice to thrive and not survive, to bloom and blossom despite the circumstances because of how deep my roots have grown in the Lord.
While I am not exactly where I pictured myself as being 10 years ago today, I know that I am a much better woman because of the path the Lord led me to. And I cannot help but think of this verse as I walk in the coming portion of my life:
“I will restore to you the years that the locusts ate"
Joel 2:25a
God is restoring what was not right in the last ten years. If I continue to root deeply into His Vine, I cannot fathom the blessings He has for the next.