Our post today comes from a new staff member, Sandra Jergensen. Sandra recently moved to Texas by way of Baltimore and San Francisco and is adjusting to life in the suburbs. She loves sunlight, bold colors, and exquisitely dark chocolate. She also devours cookbooks like novels and writes a bit at www.section89.com.
I am turning thirty this week. Really. Finally. And I haven’t dreaded it at all. I don’t fear wrinkles. I’m not scared of being older than I have been. I like to think I am the type of person to embrace it. I like myself ever so much more at thirty than I did at fifteen, nineteen or twenty-three. And I am beginning to realize why. I know myself better now than I did then.
At one point I dreaded aging because I was afraid of being unsatisfied with myself. I feared that I would reach a milestone and only see what I hadn’t done, what I wished I would have done, and felt miserable at the waste of time. How I should’ve taken those art and guitar classes I have always wanted to. I could’ve gone to graduate school, learned to crochet, and gotten over the asthmatic anxiety that snorkeling gives me. I didn’t do any of those things.
Instead of marking achievements and the lack thereof, I am learning to look at who I have become rather than just what I have done. Getting comfortable with myself and knowing who I am is more soul satisfying than learning how to throw clay, snorkeling, or hanging a graduate degree on the wall. While doing things is good and accomplishment is nice, the person who does them, and her priorities, matter more.
I had a conversation with a friend last year on how our goals have evolved. It is a nice way of realizing that I don’t meet up to the hopes and expectations I had for myself at sixteen, eighteen, twenty, or twenty-six. One of my lighter goals included regrowing the glamorous long hair I had as a teenager for my thirtieth birthday. Well, the woman who took off way more than the trim I requested and turned my side-sweeping bang into a blunt cut that doesn’t work for my voluminous curly hair crashed that dream on Friday.
If I only saw what I have done in the last thirty years compared to what I thought I wanted to do years ago, I have failed. But I haven’t. I’ve just changed or was forced to. (Thanks so much, hairstylst I will not be returning to.) I was given challenges, some which I created some for myself, that my younger self buckled and whimpered at. Looking back now I see that I slogged through them, and they became the times that shaped, molded, and honed me into the present self I accept better than I did in the past. I don’t regret the hard things I’ve worked through to be me. I’ve become more than the things I thought I wanted to do. And I realize now, I still have a lot more time to do it all.
I hold to the belief that if we all knew each other, really knew and understood each other, we would see something worth loving in everyone, without exception. I appreciate that time is doing the same for me. I wasn’t always kind to myself in the past and frequently found things I didn’t like. Thirty years of getting to know myself is helping me change that. I know and recognize myself more now. Who I am over-arches what I’ve done and do in the future. Even though I am not satisfied with everything about me, I know myself enough to love me in spite of what I am still working on. I know that if I were completely satisfied that I would also be bored. And I know I relish a project. Even if it’s just myself.
And I think the materials I am working with at thirty are better than they were five, ten, or fifteen years ago. And thankfully, my hair will grow back and perhaps be glamorous for my thirty-first birthday, if that is still my goal.
How was your thirtieth birthday or milestone birthday? Or make me feel better and tell me your haircut horror stories.
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