Today I turned 30 years old. Yay? NO.
Looking back on the twenties that I just departed, I see that I’ve changed so much – some for the better, more for the worse. When I turned 20 in 2007, I wasn’t exactly riding high, but life was looking promising. I had a direction, I had a goal, and I had reasonable confidence that I would eventually make it there. Now, ten years later, I feel like I’ve seen so much, done so much, and fell so far. I’m the total opposite of what I was at 20. I’m 30 and I’ve been told I look like I’m 22 or 23, but inside I feel like I’m 60 – worn, weary, and bitter from what has been a brutal decade. A decade that I feel was largely wasted on battling against myself and constantly learning lessons the hard way.
I’ve been meaning to blog about what’s happened in the last year, this last mostly-horrible year of my twenties, and how my new life has been going. I haven’t had the time. I barely have the time right now, which is why the quality of this writing probably isn’t up to par. I’ll hopefully write more later, but suffice to say, my life for the past year – really, for the past several years but especially this past year – has been mostly miserable, punctuated by occasional moments of blissful happiness when I somehow manage to escape and forget the pain of my regular life, until I’m brought back down to earth and have to go back to it. Every day feels like yet another round of trudging through a cycle of regret, longing, and confusion. I was at work today and the enormity of turning 30 and being so damn old already and having wasted most of the past ten years hit me hard. I just wanted to collapse on the ground, and in fact I nearly did so.
I normally like to do special trips for my birthday and other occasions but my life has turned so bad that I’ve lost much of my previously held enthusiasm for doing so. I originally was going to go to Dallas for this birthday but I changed my mind because my life has too many problems right now. (I’m planning on going in a few weeks instead.) This has been a pretty miserable and meh-whatever birthday so far – I got a few hours of sleep, spent a few more hours catching up on a week’s worth of emails that I haven’t had the time to get to, and all around I feel like crap.
This isn’t an auspicious start to a new decade. I guess I’ll post again in 2027 and offer another short and hasty retrospection of the preceding ten years. I wish I could say it’ll be much happier than this one, but I’m really not expecting it. My thirty years of life so far have not turned out anywhere near what I ever hoped for.
maverickjh 