Dirty Thirty

On Saturday, I went to a tavern. On Saturday night, I went to a tavern on the Gold Coast to celebrate my best friend’s birthday. On Saturday night, I went to a tavern on the Gold Coast, got drunk and celebrated 30 glorious years on earth with my bestest buddy. It doesn’t sound like much, but for me, I have this inner voice, growing louder as the days and weeks turn by, reminding me that I too will turn 30 and this is grinding on my nerves.

This is the same voice that goaded me through my dark days of my undergraduate years, and my even darker days of post high-school failure. Back then, when I was 17, I told myself, failure was ok, so long as I did something with my life. As long as I had an adventure and ended up successful, one failure was ok. So long as I had my life together by the time I was 30. I bargained with myself and I told myself it was ok to fail, I had time up my sleeve. I was young. I had time to travel to Europe, and one day, before I turned 30, I would have a degree and be living on Grey Street South Bank. All of this was possible because I had this voice reminding me that I had goals, plans and ambition.

So now, as I am less than a month away from my Golden Birthday, this voice won’t shut up. The quiet reminder of what I wanted to achieve has turned into this obnoxious drunkard who won’t see reason with compromise. The voice won’t accept backpacking in New Zealand instead of Europe, nor a mortgage on a “renovators dream” in Northern NSW, instead of a light-filled studio apartment on Grey Street with my cat and lover, and the voice definitely doesn’t care for still being at uni.

With grace and poise while re-applying lippy, in-between cake and speeches my bestie from high school told me she had been meditating on growing older and wasn’t that bothered by it. I know it’s a privilege stolen from many, but I can’t shake that damn voice, telling me to do better.