In case you couldn't tell by how excitedly I've been talking about it lately, my birthday is Friday. I am turning 32. THIRTY. TWO. I'm not having conniptions about it or anything, but it's definitely the weirdest thing to ever happen to me.
Here's how it's working in my head. I feel like I am supposed to feel like I'm behind the 32-year-old curve. Like I have somehow missed the "Where You're Supposed to be In Life" train and am, instead, hitch-hiking along "Life's Highway for Wandering Souls." Like everyone else who is 32 is like, MILES farther along. Down the path to what, I'm not sure, but this is how I feel like I'm supposed to feel.
Facebook would have me know that approximately 90% of my friends are married. I'd say half of those marriages are at least 5 years old. A lot of you are starting to have second children. Older friends have teenagers. This is absolutely insane to me. It is still completely preposterous to me that girls whose hair I've held after 10 shots of tequila are mothers now. Not that they shouldn't be. They are WONDERFUL mothers. I merely mean that when we have brunch with the Wises and they have a little girl, to me it feels like we borrowed a kid from somewhere else and it came to have breakfast with us. It still never fully registers that it belongs to someone I know. It's even crazier that I like it, which we don't even need to discuss, or Donna Ciccarelli will put out an APB on my uterus.
On Saturday mornings, my friends have music class and soccer games. Do you know what I have? Probably a hangover and hot boyfriend sleeping next to me. Hopefully I'll have a cup of coffee or a Bloody Mary to take the pain away. I have hours of uninterrupted day with no one to dictate my whereabouts but me. I have brunch. I have a bike ride. I have doing nothing if it suits me. I have any old silly thing I want to have. (This selfish soul of mine knows that if (IF) we have kids some day, all of that goes away, so you can bet your ass I'm holding out as long as I can.)
I have this sweet friend at work who is 23 and she's going through her quarter-life crisis and, smartly, comes to me for sage advice. ;) The funny thing is, I relate more to her struggles and woes than I do to people my age who read parenting books and go on play-dates. I am far more familiar, at 32, with what it feels like to be a total disaster than I think I will ever be with being a "grown up." It feels WAY more impossible to imagine having a 5-year-old than it does to imagine myself in Athens, for my THIRTY SECOND birthday, shaking my ass with Ginny Brock. Anyways, the young'un asks me about feeling lost, and while I empathize COMPLETELY, in my head, I secretly think, STAY LOST! STAY LOST AS LONG AS YOU CAN.
I always feel like I have all of the rest of my life for those things. I mean, I get that we are never promised tomorrow and some other quotes that can be found in an Instagram picture of the beach and toes in the sand or something. But I've never, and still don't, feel in any rush to get where I'm going. Except for the places I want to travel. Untouched lands, not purported timelines, are what find me anxious. Lately, this has left me feeling immature or something? While perfectly content to be mostly a grown-up when it comes to my career, the rest of me is WAY more concerned with having fun and maintaining an ever-present level of adventure (whereby drama sometimes (unfortunately) seems interchangeable). Everyone else's priorities seem so different. Success for me isn't a perfect wedding or first steps or stuff. It's an entire weekend without a Parliament, not throwing up when I drink with Neal Brock, or the fact that I've been dating someone incredible for 4 WHOLE MONTHS. I think people look at my life and it must seem so crazy and unsettled. Truthfully, there are days when it is. But the rest of the time it's really, honestly, inexplicably, epically excellent.
I joke a lot about how I'm feeling old these days, but the fact of the matter is that I'm actually feeling REALLY young. And that's a blessing. As I approach this birthday and think about what I think I'm supposed to be doing at 32, I'm pretty pumped that I'm not doing any of those things. Not that those things are bad, it's just TOTALLY not where I'm at. To quote my tiny blond hero, "I don't know about you, but I'm feeling 22." And I wouldn't have it any other way.
