#3 — Turning 30: Part 1

Goodbye, my 20s. As of Tuesday, August 15th 2023, this is the blog of a woman in her 30s!!!

[ insert Steve Buscemi “How do you do, fellow kids?” meme]

Throughout the year I thought about what I would do for my 30th birthday and I was pretty set on a Y2K Rave themed party. Nothing sounded more fun to me than everybody dressed up in late 90s/early 2000s fashion and dancing to a fully euro-techno playlist. That scene in Miss Congeniality where the pageant contestants rebelliously go to a glow club and eat pizza and drink shots out of like test tubes kept popping up in my party planning fantasies. Hell yeah, this party was gonna be one to remember.

But as July rolled around, the motivation I once had for all of that just… completely left my body. Okay, I won’t do a big party, I thought, I’ll just do some kind of bar-hang thing, easy! I keep telling people I’m in my “How I Met Your Mother” phase of life where I just wanna hunker down in divey booth and talk about life with my pals. Yeah, a bar-hang!

More time passed and suddenly it was two weeks before my birthday. I still hadn’t decided what to do. I knew I needed to send out some kind of invite, people were asking what day I was thinking so they could make their plans , but I couldn’t set a date. As big as a milestone as one’s 30th is, I realized I really wasn’t interested in making a big deal out of it. It was nice people were interested in celebrating with me, but, quite frankly, the thought felt more exhausting than exciting. I imagined people receiving the invite, texting back how they couldn’t make it but really wish they could! Or feeling obligated to drag themselves out of their apartments the night of because they said they’d be there, show up and spend $50 on drinks and food only for us to actually have a quality interaction for maybe a total of 5 minutes before having to leave. I couldn’t handle the attention and potentially disappointing a massive amount of people in some way.

Sorry if this is all sounding negative or something! Don’t get me wrong, I can love a big party, and I love my friends and family so much, but it just didn’t feel right this year and im a very sensitive person with paralyzing fear of doing the right or wrong thing, so I had to go with my instincts. I did wonder, am I going to regret not doing something bigger? So far though, I’ve had no regrets. Maybe it’s bad timing, or maybe turning 30 really does mellow you out, but more and more I just wanted to lay low and really connect with people when I could, so instead I decided to do a bunch of little things with many small groups of people I’m very close to. In fact, I still have a couple of more plans to bring the birthday week to a close, and I’m excited about that! I’m excited about my 30s in general honestly and have been reflecting a LOT about my 20s coming to a close and going into this new decade so heads up, I’ll probably be talking about it more in future posts. I mean, I’m three days in and it’s already been… interesting lol.

Part 2 coming soon 💌