I know I go through some kind of crisis every couple of years as I get older. At age twenty, I had a total crisis about leaving my teenage years, which, of course, is utterly ridiculous to me now. I moved to the woods in Northern California and lived for four months with no running water, no car, no pillow. I hitchhiked, lived in teepees, yurts, and plywood A-frames (when I was lucky), and woke up with mosquitoes in my face every morning. No matter how ludicrous, it was definitely my most indubitable age freak-out.
Eventually, I calmed down, and came back to Vegas to live with my family and go to college. Nine years later, here I am in Chicago, thinking again about what might be around the bend.
I'm halfway through my Master's degree at DePaul University, a feat of which I am simultaneously proud and judgmental. Sometimes the loud doubtful voice in my head says, "You're almost thirty. Almost every other woman you went to school with is already practicing medicine, marketing, or motherhood. Why do you take so long?" Sometimes I feel retarded, in the most literal sense of that word. Like everything takes me so long to figure out and to do. As my mom says, "You just like to learn your lessons the hard way."
But over the last few weeks or so, as I look toward my 29th birthday in May, childless, working retail, still only halfway through my M.A., I think, I can't do this anymore. I can't look at everyone's Facebook page and measure my success by their lives. I can't secretly spew jealousy inside of myself every time another one of my friends gets engaged, married, or has another baby.
So, I've decided to start being productive about my age anxiety. Instead of comparing and damning, I want to expound my energy taking better care of myself, working towards putting myself in a position where I would make a good wife, a good mother, a woman with her own life and career. This has taken so much pressure off of me, and off of my relationship. My poor boyfriend, who is furiously and anxiously trying to finish his first novel, runs screaming in the other direction when I start to pout about my "situation." I get it; he loves me, but he's birthing his own baby right now, the thing he's wanted to do his whole life.
What does all of this mean? I'm not quite sure yet. I bought myself some gentle herbal teas to help tone my uterus and any damage that 7 years of birth control might have done to it (though I have not stopped taking my birth control!) I'm making appointments to the gynecologist and even the dentist to make sure everything's in order. I'm trying to exercise, 30 minutes of walking five times a week, and when my broken arm heals, hopefully some yoga. I'm making my own plans to pursue my PhD where I want to pursue it (and to my happy surprise, my boyfriend wants to stick by me on that).
I don't know. All I know is that this year, this last revolution around the sun in my twenties has to be about me, for me. I have to take these last few hundred days and love them, love myself. And I have got to stop comparing, looking back, looking all around me. After all...
No comments:
Post a Comment