On Turning Thirty
Thank sweet baby Jesus.
You're thirty. Or better put, your twenties--that hellish brutal decade--is over. No longer living hand to mouth. No longer surviving off of hope and credit or talking yourself into stupid or dangerous or stupidly dangerous situations because "that's what people your age do." Maybe they do--and maybe they shouldn't--you really don't care anymore. Just like you don't care about trying to prove you have nothing to prove.
You don't want to save the world anymore either. Or give yourself over to A Cause. You have learned that your happiness stems from tending your own little corner of the world and nourishing the relationships within it. Let others find their own path because the only one who can save them is them--just as only you were the one who could pull yourself up from the muck of your twenties into the bliss of the here and now.
At thirty, you simply do not have the energy to be anything other than who you are. And now that you know the delicious power of self-respect, you can't talk yourself into trying on those other identities like so many cheap, ill-fitting dresses. So you now wear your loud colors and your wild hair and too many rings stacked upon your fingers--and polka dot dresses because why not? You dance and you read books indiscriminately (what's a canon except for a collection of books that at one time or another were considered trash?). And you celebrate the fact that your life is made up of listening to your jazz records and cooking marvelous family dinners and star gazing and writing things people read and always, always being open to the unexpected.
So you will light your birthday candles (all 30 of them) and make your birthday wish and eat your birthday cake and with each bite, relish that you have found it: that ephemeral thing called Happiness. Day in, day out--that's where the magic is at.