SEEING OUT THE LAST YEAR OF MY TWENTIES
October 17th 1993. My first birthday.
How surreal. My twenty ninth birthday. The last year of my twenties. 365 days till the big 3.0.
Last year I spent my birthday in a pandemic. Nothing unusual, we’ve all experienced a lockdown birthday now no matter what month you were born in. This year, a sedate affair with a bracing walk on the beach planned with the family I had to stay apart from last time. Next year, I can only hope will be more normal with a bash worthy of a big birthday or a trip away.
I feel like your twenties, like most other decades in your life, is a big pivotal one. Kylie Jenner wasn’t wrong when she said she was realising stuff and I think your twenties is a big time in your life for that.
I’ve tried to really look inward when thinking about how I feel about entering the last year of my twenties and I still don’t really have an answer I don’t think. A mix of emotions, a mix of feelings I suppose.
Loss
I have a lot of big feelings about the last 18 months and I intend to write about them another time but a big one is a feeling of loss or grief. Loss and grief for the coupla years I have missed and the experiences I would have had. I really felt when I got married in February 2020 that the next two and a half years till I was thirty were going to be the time of my life. I was going to say yes to everything, to fill my evenings and weekends with fun, to go on spontaneous trips away, to get back to Copenhagen with my pals, to go on honeymoon, to spend every waking minute with my family and my nieces. I really wanted the last few years of my twenties to be the best, to spend all the money, to live life to the full and live selfishly before life doesn’t necessarily allow that anymore. I feel like the last few years and the experiences we have had have robbed me somewhat of that.
Sadness
Is it a thing that we actually feel or is it a thing that society tells us to feel but I do feel a bit of sadness that my twenties is coming to an end. I have enjoyed a lot of this decade and hated a lot too. It’s been a really tough last 6 years or so and it’s made me resilient and strong in a way I didn’t expect to have to endure. But amongst that has been some of the most fun times and in a way I feel sad that the twenty something version of me might go.
Trepidation
Now it definitely is a society thing to tell you to feel scared of turning the next big zero. Consumerism tells us to fear the ageing process, everything is geared toward keeping us younger and even at the actually sprightly age of twenty nine, I fear getting older. What I don’t fear is the change in my body or the slightly softer bits around my stomach or the bags under my eyes. I don’t have a single grey hair, the wrinkles aren’t quite there and generally I am a ok with me. What I fear is not bouncing back, picking up injury, how I’m tired all the fucking time. I feel a sense of trepidation about what the next decade holds for the world, for society, for the climate, for health, for more pandemics, for what comes next.
Contentment
Whilst there’s a lot of slightly negative feelings toward entering my last year in my twenties, there’s also a lot of good too. The last decade have been busy, fun, happy, full of joy and have brought me some of the biggest and best times of my life. I feel quite content sat here in my lovely house, with money in the bank, with a job, with my husband upstairs and my dog by my feet. Generally as a family we have had a guts full of bad times the last 9 years but we’re healthy, we’re here and we’re together enjoying the two youngest members of the clan. It’s not been a bad twenty something experience at all in the grand scheme of life.
Excitement
My over riding feeling of turning thirty is excitement. I think my thirties will see a lot more change but hopefully a lot more stability in the end. I have seen so much about how your twenties are the years of figuring out who you are and your thirties are the years of enjoying them and the closer I get to it the more I feel like that is true. I feel more happy with myself, with my life, more assured in my convictions, more self aware, less willing to take shit, more authoritative and confident.
Hope
And finally, hope. I am hopeful that the last year of my twenties will be a move toward something more normal, that life will get back to business, that we will be happier and more safe and less worried. I am hopeful that the world will heal, that we will be nicer kinder more tolerant people. I hope the next 365 days will be full of fun happy memories and that I will burst into my thirties happy, loved, healthy and surrounded by my best people.
And so now, the question really is……what do I do with my blog name when I’m no longer a twenty something?