Normalize coming of age in your 30s

Changing the channel on expectations of aging

Coming-of-age (noun)

: the attainment of prominence, respectability, recognition, or maturity
: a marked loss of childhood innocence, to some degree, in favor of maturity. Inner conflict and turmoil, resulting in personal growth and development. Developing from a self-centered thinking to a more worldly, other-focused thought. Learning where one fits in the larger world.

A few months ago I joined a run club for artists. Every Wednesday, we meet bright and early at 6:30 a.m. to observe art together at a gallery or DIY space around town. Someone brings bananas. Another brings coffee. We look at sculptures, photographs, watercolors, and other mediums of art on exhibit. At 7 am we run. Sometimes just a mile, sometimes three or four. The point is not to be fast or even good at running but to get out of your usual routine, experience something new, get some exercise in and build community.

Though I’ve been a runner on and off for years, this is the first time I’ve had a dedicated practice. After a few sessions, early Wednesday meet ups to look at art turned into Friday morning runs by the lake and Sunday morning trail runs to soak up nature. It’s not easy. It takes monumental mental strength just to get my ass up at that time of morning and decide I’m doing to do something poorly for an hour, not just by myself, but in front of mostly strangers or people I haven’t known that long. Yet, when it’s all over, despite however mediocre or out of breath I feel as a baby athlete, a tiny me inside is so stoked I did the thing I wanted to do, instead of reverting to old coping mechanisms or listening to the part of my brain whispering, “Just go back to sleep. It’s easier this way.”

The older I get the more I realize I’m willing to be bad at things I want to do but haven’t done yet in life due to self doubt, fear of the unknown, and comfort in the familiar. By taking on a beginner’s level of experience, whether it’s running or another interest, it’s a way of advocating for myself, to prove my inner critic wrong. See, you’re not lazy and unmotivated, you ran 5 miles today! It’s uncomfortable at times (the main reason we often don’t try new things) but in the aftermath, I’m always grateful I pushed through it. It challenges me. It shows me I’m capable of way more than I thought. Plus, it’s just fun.

In January, during a long stint of bad health and a typical mid-winter episode of seasonal depression, I decided to cancel most of my streaming services. I was tired of loafin’ around and watching bad TV. The weather made me feel mentally ill and I knew no amount of The L Word or Gilmore Girls binge watching was going to pull me out my funk.

I went through old notebooks looking for clues or a source of inspiration my former self may have left behind. In a folded piece of paper I’d ripped out, I found a bucket list of items I wrote down about 10 years ago shortly after my brother Kevin died. I was surprised and happy when I saw things like, “go volcano boarding in Nicaragua” and “learn another language” had been crossed off, accomplished.

Other goals were still nebulous and far reaching.

“Give yourself the same levels of patience and kindness you give others,” I had written in green marker after “Strengthen skills in swimming (then surfing)!” I’m still working on those two things. Though almost 10 years have passed since I first wrote the list, it reminded me of that fiery spark that’s often ignited in the aftermath of grief.

When you lose someone close to you suddenly and without warning, especially a partner or immediate family member, like a parent or a sibling, you’re reminded of your own mortality. The life you have left. The people around you. The experiences you want but haven’t had yet. All the things you haven’t learned yet. Every moment with a friend, every phone call with your sister, every fallen leaf in October, every sunset on the horizon, every choice you’ve made, keep making, will make — it all feels bigger, more meaningful now.

Urgency culture tells us we need to be available and online 24/7. There’s always an email to read, a text message to respond to, a friend’s Story to watch, a Story to post, another side hustle we could be taking on, another adult milestone to obsess over obtaining. Our friends, lovers, and coworkers resent us over putting Do Not Disturb on and taking time away from our phones in a culture of More and On and Always Available and Never Stop. But when you’re deep in the pit of grief all of that goes away. Cliche as it is, somewhere in there it all becomes background noise. It’s such a raw, unbridled wave of feeling untethered, lost, yet newly awake and human all at the same time.

Thinking about what I wrote on that list as a tender 27-year-old who just lost her only brother 10 years after losing our dad, it made me consider ways we can ignite similar senses of wonder and curiosity beyond grief or trauma, how we can leave urgency culture behind (at least some of the time), the ways we view aging, classic coming-of-age narratives, and the times of life that are deemed appropriate to be a newbie.

It’s a bit strange, no? The story our society feeds us about ways a person should be when often the story doesn’t include much growth or nuance outside of run-of-the-mill heteronormative standards. Learning and self-development don’t stop when you graduate college or turn 25 and if they did that’d be pretty boring. Who I am now is not who I was 10 years ago. Who I am now may not be the same person I’ll be in another 10 years. There’s shadows and memories and skin that shows different but our lives are not static.

I mean, hell, how would I have known I loved dirt biking until a buddy of mine pulled up with a bag of tacos, a bottle of mezcal, and an extra bike in his truck on a random afternoon when we were fresh in the throes of breakups at 30? Or that I’d have a newfound love of astronomy at the age of 33 after feeling an unparallelled headrush of awe, smallness, love, and connection my first time stargazing with a group of astronomers under the dark skies of West Texas? Or that I’d end up with the most random side hustle one could imagine as a field archaeologist all due to chasing my curiosity after reading an article about creepy and fascinating findings in melting permafrost in Siberia?

After spending my 20s in the throes of grief from losing half of my family and figuring out ways to stay alive, my 30s have been a more expansive place of growth and self-development the younger me didn’t get the chance to experience. Living for a second time doesn’t always have to be rooted in grief or trauma. The most open and curious, creative souls I’ve met and look up to view life in a similar way.

“Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life,” Bertrand Russell advised in his timeless advice on how to grow old.

In unison with David Bowie’s idea of perfect happiness, Nick Cave writes:

Read. Read as much as possible. Read the big stuff, the challenging stuff, the confronting stuff, and read the fun stuff too. Visit galleries and look at paintings, watch movies, listen to music, go to concerts — be a little vampire running around the place sucking up all the art and ideas you can. Fill yourself with the beautiful stuff of the world. Have fun. Get amazed. Get astonished. Get awed on a regular basis, so that getting awed is habitual and becomes a state of being. Fully understand your enormous value in the scheme of things because the planet needs people like you, smart young creatives full of awe, who can minister to the world with positive, mischievous energy, young people who seek spiritual enrichment and who see hatred and disconnection as the corrosive forces they are. These are manifest indicators of a human being with immense potential.

As Maria Popova reflects on these passages, she shares, “This openhearted curiosity, this aura of astonishment, becomes an antidote to the spiritual poison most corrosive to the world — cynicism, that supreme enemy of hope. At any stage of life, the refusal to succumb to cynicism is among our greatest triumphs of the spirit.”

I’m not that interested in owning a home, staying in the same town for too long, getting married or having children by X age. Maybe if I wasn’t a farmer’s daughter raised with only a love of land, sky, and the natural world or maybe if I came from the kind of money that made living easier my priorities would change.

Instead, I’m more interested in turning every year and upcoming decade of my life as one of the most interesting stories my 85-year-old self could tell. I’m in my 30s now. They’ve been good. But my 40s? My 50s? I think that’s where I might actually hit my stride. Life, like love, like a work of art, is an experiment we have the power to engage with and change when the mood strikes and the feeling’s right. Whether it’s creating a running routine for the first time in my life or learning how to use a telescope, there’s magic in the discovery of self as you age.

Normalize coming of age in your 30s. Normalize coming of age every 6 months. Normalize taking on a beginner’s mindset. Normalize being bad at things and having that feel okay. Normalize never losing the spark that drives you to wake up every day and create your own world in a dying global landscape that wants us and is counting on us to give up on our values, our dreams, our hope.