Go Hard, Then Go Home - How Turning 30 Differs for Everyone

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It’s the plot of every Reese Witherspoon-starring rom-com: twenty-something woman returns home after failing at life in the big city, whereupon she meets a handsome young farmhand and kickstarts her career by overhauling her small town’s radio station/newspaper/flailing economy, while simultaneously mending her fraught relationship with her family. But what if there is no handsome farmhand? No career to resurrect, and no family to make amends with? What if, in fact, all Reese Witherspoon and I have in common is failing? And above all, what if it’s not funny? 

I moved to New York two years ago, when I was 27. ‘Why’ is the question I am most often asked (other than whether or not I’m from Australia), and after all this time, I think I finally have the answer: I was bored. I had a nice apartment and nice friends and a nice life and I was bored.

The thing about growing up believing you’re an exceptional person who is going to do exceptional things is that, the older you get and the more unexceptional you turn out to be, the more drastic the means you will go to in order to prove how special you are. Move to a city where you know no-one for no discernible reason? Sure! You can’t just dye your hair anymore. Everyone’s dyed their hair by now. You have to think bigger. 

My parents were encouraging of this youthful delusion of specialness, but they were also big fans of the realism pep talk. I remember my Dad standing behind me as I was scrolling through UCAS, identifying the universities that were polytechnics and that I therefore would not be applying to. Which basically ruled out most of the creative courses I wanted to study. 

___STEADY_PAYWALL___

I don’t mean to blame this all on my father. How trite that would be. He wanted me to have security, a ‘real degree’ from a ‘real university’ that would guarantee me a ‘real job’. And I have all those things. But am I exceptional? A truly exceptional person would have told him that they were going to apply for Creative Writing at UEA and he was going to deal with it. Instead I meekly clicked the buttons that took me to the University of Bath. I fell into a job out of university and stayed there, breezing past my friends who were studying master’s degrees and taking unpaid internships with the hope of having their dream jobs in a few years. I stayed in the same position, and when the opportunity to go to New York came up, I took it, not realizing I would be condemning myself to three more years in a job I hated, just so I could live somewhere exciting. I could feel other people moving past me, into a new, more mature period of their lives, that they had earned by suffering earlier on. So I had to pass them. I went to New York.

“There was a time where that kind of life felt like death to me. A long-term partner, a dog, a house in the country, dinner parties that end before the last train home. But now that I’m surrounded on all sides by people who are living that life, it’s starting to look very appealing.”

The problem with coming out of your subservient shell in later life is that you start to appear slightly manic to those around you. Some people are rebellious in their teens; my sister certainly was, which made me positively nun-like in comparison. So when, at 27, I decided my life was ~going to start~, everyone else was settling down with a cup of tea. While people partied their way through high school, I read every book in the library. Now those people are reading books and I’m going out in Brooklyn every night, waking in the morning under a pile of duvets and self-loathing. And there’s none of the lenience I would have been afforded had I done this when the time was right. I still have to get up in the morning and act like a 29-year-old, because I’m not supposed to be doing this anymore. I’m supposed to have grown out of this time in my life by now, not be growing into it. And by indulging this need to be young, wild and free – by listening to that voice inside me that says I didn’t have any fun when I was younger, so I’d better have some now – I’ve become a caricature of an adult. It screams mid-life crisis, but I don’t even have enough money to do that properly. I can’t afford a sports car. I can barely afford a nice bottle of orange wine from the shop. 

I am the friend who is always handy with a good story, a terrible dating anecdote, a drunk tattoo. I sit across from my friends in bars as they laugh and bury their face in their hands and nestle into their partners’ shoulders and go home at 10pm because they have to feed the dog. They say they want my life but they don’t. When I announced that I was uprooting my entire existence to move to New York, I heard that refrain so many times: I wish I could do that! But they didn’t. Anyone who wants to could do that. What they really meant was, I wish I had as little regard for my life as you do so I could just sack it all off and move across the ocean. What they really meant was, I wish I gave in every time to the impulse to give up comfort for glamour, practicality for fantasy, security for ‘the story’. I wish I had no concern for my future. 

So now, a month away from my 30th birthday and with a rapidly expiring work visa, I’m having to plan a return to London, my party hat askew, my balloons deflating behind me. A failure, in short. What do I have to show for my pursuit of the American dream? A couple more tattoos, some Instagram posts of mountains, and two years of partying anecdotes that no-one wants to listen to. And the kicker is, no-one else’s life went on pause when I left London. There were times when I thought my eventual return home would mean slotting neatly back into the hole I had left behind; moving back in with my best friend, taking weekend trips to Paris and Milan, generally gadding about. But life went on in my absence. All of my best friends now live with their significant others. They own sofas, and have professionally framed art prints on the wall. They have advanced in their careers; now they make real money. They no longer have to take three different night buses home so as to only spend $1.50 on the journey. If they go on weekend trips now, it won’t be with me. The hole I left is still there, but no-one can see it except me.

There was a time where that kind of life felt like death to me. A long-term partner, a dog, a house in the country, dinner parties that end before the last train home. But now that I’m surrounded on all sides by people who are living that life, it’s starting to look very appealing. I’ll stand on a rooftop as strangers mill and sway around me, looking out at the lights of the city that promised me a new lease on life, and wish I was at home, curled up on the sofa with someone who loves me. I’ll wonder if I missed the boat to a life of security and comfortable warmth. If I had it once, but gave it up for a life of unspecified excitement. I’m leaving the party too late; the lights are on in the club and I’m the only one still there. There’s a special kind of shame that comes with realizing that your patronizing claims of ‘That sounds great for you, but it’s not what I want from my life’ have faded into white noise, to be replaced with a roiling jealousy of what everyone else has but you don’t. The gnawing panic that you may have left it too late to get it for yourself.

So I’ll return. I’ll move into a new flat with a new set of strangers, my same old Ikea-framed prints and battered Jonathan Franzen books dragging along behind me. I’ll start my career over at 30, duking it out with tight-bodied twenty-two year olds whose two months spent editing their university magazine will be preferable to my seven years’ experience in a ‘real job’. I’ll go to dinner at my coupled-up friends’ houses, take a nice bottle of wine that I won’t be able to afford, listen to them talk about kitchen renovations on the house they now own. I’ll take the night bus home alone, listening to podcasts about people who found their success later in life after failing at their twenties, liking the innumerable ‘I said yes!’ posts on Instagram, scouring ASOS for bridesmaid’s dresses under $50. I’ll be happy for my friends, and I’ll hope against hope that it isn’t too late for me. I’ll sit around the kitchen table with my new housemates, talking fondly of the time I lived in New York. And then I’ll make myself a cup of tea, sit on the sofa, and start, finally, to grow up. 

Words: Megan Jones | Illustrations: Sophie Parsons