Why We Don’t Always Have It Together In Our Late Twenties

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Why We Don’t Always Have It Together In Our Late Twenties

“By the time I’m thirty . . .” It’s a go-to phrase for the free-spirited, wild child in her teens or early twenties. It’s the magic cutoff, the point of maturity. It’s the point when we’ll have our stuff together, we’ll have it all figured it out.

By thirty, we will be settled, confident, and secure. We’ll have the man of our dreams who we crawl into bed every night with, cuddling until our heart feels like it will explode. We’ll have the job we wanted from birth, a job that is also well-paying and has limitless room for growth. We’ll have two children, perfectly behaved of course, who cause us only to smile. We’ll have a dog, also perfectly behaved, and a single, cleanly cat. We’ll have a fenced in yard, a perfectly maintained house, and dinner parties the whole town will talk about.

These are the dreams we all dream about, to an extent. Sure, we might substitute a turtle for the cat or five kids instead of two. We might transplant the house from our hometown to a wild city. Regardless, we women seem to set a deadline just the same. Thirty. By thirty. So in our late twenties, well, we better be following the carefully laid stepping stones to get us to our goal.

As a twenty-seven-year-old, however, I’ve come to realize this: the thirty goal is ludicrous. It seems manageable as an eighteen-year-old, even feasible at twenty-one. Thirty seems like a distant, airy planet, a place we’ll get someday.

But as I near the milestone and look at my life, I’ve realized . . . I haven’t got everything figured out. Not even close.

What’s more?

I’ve realized it’s okay,

Women in the modern society still maintain the pressures of generations past. In the not-so-distant past, women were expected to be bearing children in their early twenties. Career goals weren’t really a part of the equation. Thankfully for many of us, all of this has changed.

We’ve got new dreams and more opportunities before us than ever before. We are not limited by societal demands for multiplying, for avoiding intellectual thought. We can, we can, we can. That’s what we’re told.

So it’s no wonder that it’s taking some of us a while to figure out what we want to do with that “I can.” Travel the world? Teach? Write? Climb the corporate ladder? Farm? Find a cure? The sky’s the limit. So thirty, therefore, can no longer be our arbitrary limit to self-realization, self-fulfillment, and self-labeling.

For some of us, thirty is the magic number. By our late twenties, we’ve settled into a routine, surrounded ourselves with people we want to be with forever. That’s awesome. There’s nothing wrong with finding yourself.

But for some of us, thirty isn’t even close to the magic number. Our late twenties become times of self-exploration, self-questioning, and even confusion. Dreams we thought we wanted become distant. People we thought we were madly in love with become strangers. We realize our lives aren’t following a perfectly laid course we had in mind.

So, no, we don’t all have it figured out by thirty. Some of us haven’t even come to terms with the fact we’re not teenagers anymore. Some of us haven’t learned how to “adult” yet. But the beautiful thing about the modern era? It’s okay. Forty can be the new thirty. Or even fifty.

Because there’s no rush on finding happiness, and there’s no deadline on solidifying your dreams.