Birthday Cake

Always thought that turning 30 would be some big event. That there would be a big trip or a send off of a younger self. To feel "old".

In my head it came with a dramatic before and after. A milestone montage. A clean cut between versions of me, like closing credits on one chapter and opening credits on the next.

But it’s exactly the same as any other age. If anything, it’s brought more peace and joy.

That surprised me. Not because I expected fireworks, but because so much of how we talk about age is built around escalation. More pressure. More urgency. More rules about what should have happened by now. Instead, 30 has felt like the volume turned down on the noise and turned up on what matters.

It feels like a balance between the calamity of seeing all 30 years pass in memories but peace in knowing there’s still twice that amount of time left.

That tension is real. There’s a kind of vertigo when you realize how fast the past can collapse into a highlight reel. Moments you can still see vividly, even if you can’t place the exact year. People who shaped you, jobs you thought would last, versions of your life you once took very seriously.

But the other side of that is calming. There is still room to build and rebuild. There is time to learn things slowly, to change your mind, to choose a different story without making it a crisis.

It also carries a form of wisdom. I already feel more validated in telling people I’m 30, but still find myself in rooms where people respond with "oh you’re still such a baby". It’s a nice feeling.

I like that contradiction. Thirty sounds authoritative from a distance, but up close it’s still unfinished, still flexible. It is old enough to be trusted and young enough to keep experimenting.

As someone who thinks a lot about storytelling, I notice how we are trained to treat milestones as plot points. The big trip. The big announcement. The big reinvention. But real life is often quieter and more continuous. The transition happens in small choices. The edit is subtle. The best scenes are sometimes the ones with no dialogue.

And maybe that is the gift. Not the feeling of becoming someone else overnight, but the feeling of becoming more yourself with less performance attached.

Here’s to another one. Cheers to everyone.

To the people who are approaching 30 and expecting a dramatic shift, and to the people already past it who know the truth. It is not a finish line. It is not a warning. It is just a number that, if you let it, can mark the moment you stop rushing and start arriving.