30

I had all sorts of ideas about the kind of person I'd be on my 30th birthday. At 30 I'd be a grown-up. I'd be doing what I wanted to do with my life, or at least know what this thing I wanted to do was and how I was going to get there. I'd have a decent selection of skills, both essential and useless, and be good enough at a couple of them to stand out in a group of people who also had that skill. I'd be happy with my body, with my hair, with my style. I'd have a handle on all the things adults need to do to function comfortably, and I'd be pretty OK with where I was.

What actually happened was that I spent the first few days of my new decade in a state of inexplicable and slightly scary depression, where I cried more or less constantly and felt like the world was caving in. Despite having woken up on my 30th birthday in goddamn Florence.

I had a flurry of half-baked, panicky ideas of how to fix everything that seemed perfectly logical from inside the half-baked panic, then freaked out even harder when they didn't work. I watched myself go through self-destructive behaviour after self-destructive behaviour and gave myself spectacularly ineffective pep talks.

"You see this thing you're doing? You should stop that."
"I agree."
"You're still doing it, though."
"Yeah, I am, aren't I."
"You should stop. You'll feel better if you stop."
"That's true."
[three days later]
"So you're still doing it."
"Yes. I thought about what you said and I decided using logic that the best thing to do would be to carry on doing it."
"That doesn't make any sense."
"No, it doesn't, does it. I'll think about that."

I feel better today, for no real reason. Maybe because I managed to make a phone call I needed to make. Maybe because I've decided that phone call is the one that will magically fix everything. But I've been thinking without crying, and I've made a couple of plans, and I've had a couple of realisations.

This year is going to be really, really hard. I can't even coast this year, because I actually hate coasting and it's making me sick. If I coast, the bottom will fall out of either my job or my health and everything will get exponentially worse. I don't want that year. I've already had the year where apathy fucked everything up, and I do not want it again. Which leads me to the conclusion that I need to make things harder for myself.

In my 30th year I need to face things I'd rather ignore, force myself to do things I hate, learn to do things I've been complacently telling myself I'm terrible at. I need to set myself difficult restrictions, forgo things I want to do, and be uncomfortably honest about the person I am. Not because I'm trying to punish myself, but because I deserve better than this. I deserve more than fear and sickness and frustration and aching. I'm better than this.
I am going to have a difficult, scary year, so that when I'm looking 31 in the face I can smile at it.