On Thirty

 A friend called me up the other day. To paraphrase our conversation:

Him: Hey, your birthday's coming up!
Me: Oh, you remembered! Thank you : ) (yes, I even talk out loud with emoticons, so :p)
Him: How are you doing? I thought you might want to talk about it....
Me: Hmm? What do you mean?
Him: My older brother just turned thirty and he freaked out about it for a little while.
Me: Oh, I feel fine about it.
Him: But why did you come to Ukraine? What do you really want out of life? Is this it?
Me: (internally: hey, I think I'm supposed to be asking myself those questions!)

Isn't that what we are supposed to do? Treat big numbers like 25, 30, 40, and 50 with extreme caution? Tread carefully and kind of cringe when anyone brings it up? But I don't feel like that right now; actually, I feel positively flippant about thirty.

Thirty seems fantastic. It's the beginning of a new era. It's having to earn respect less and getting to enjoy it more. You know what I mean. As long as you don't mess it up by acting like a bloody fool, people give you a bit of slack when you're older. They take it for granted that you must know at least a little something of what you're talking about. Of course there's the fact that you truly have acquired some wisdom by now. [Supposedly.]

Thirty is touted as a wake-up call. It's supposed to be that big moment where you suddenly look around, shake yourself out of the stupor of your 20s, and commence Panicking.
Start Big Plans.
Start A Career.
Start A Family.
Start a 401K Seriously.

But when I look around I already feel awake. I don't feel a lot of dissatisfaction. I certainly didn't expect this. I expected to feel what everyone warned me about, what we see dramatically portrayed on TV: the big 3-0. Instead, it's contentment.

That's not to say things are perfect. I still drag my feet when going to work a lot of the time sometimes, I still feel frustrated about certain things. If everything were great all the time, trust me, this blog would not exist. You can probably assume that with any expat blog. Sometimes the promise of 8 Months in Ukraine is the only thing that gets me through the day.

But on the whole, it's hard to look back on the past decade and wish that anything were different. It's like every single predicament, every single reaction, and every single showdown with authority had to happen as it did, every link had to line up exactly to form the chain of events that brought me to this point.

Let's review: 19. Drop out of college. Get work in Hawaii. Find inspiration in a movie, oddly enough, about people running for their lives from fire-breathing dragons. "At least they're doing something, having some kind of adventure", my little naive brain thinks. Travel alone in Central America for a long time, drinking my breakfast, lunch, and supper before it is even considered SOP by my peers, carefully observing the wide variety of older people wandering the isthmus with their emotional baggage in tow. Then back to Hawaii and onward to Alaska. I don't know how else to say it- lots of crazy shit, crazy people, crazy times. In fact, lots of friends abandon me. "Too much debauchery," they'd say, "I can't take it." 23 or 24. Off to Siberia to take classes at a university there. Government decrees I can't die until they find a safe place to bury my liver. Tromp around in the cold a lot. This adventure ends with a mugging and a black eye and the decision to turn down a job in Moscow to finish school. My best friend writes me from Siberia a month later, describing how he'd been beaten and left to die in an abandoned building. He's in the hospital for ages and his story haunts me for a very lengthy period. Straighten out my act a bit. Join a MLM to "turn professional". Tromp around in more cold, this time 200 miles south of the Arctic Circle. 26. Continue dating D, who has continued to be an incredible man and positive influence to this very day. Graduate at last. Work in refugee resettlement in Alaska and that's pretty much where this blog picks up. You know the rest of the story.

There are people tiptoeing around me, not wanting to make any ageist comments yet dying to bring it up at the same time. But I don't care. Three decades? Hell yeah I earned it! Every single year of it! And being able to be here in Ukraine is like waking up every day to a dream come true. Now, Ukraine is not a perfect country and I'm certainly beyond the infatuation stage where it can do no wrong. Instead, it's more like we're in a committed relationship (which oddly enough is how I first began blogging about Ukraine) in which I am faithful to this land of the yellow and blue flag yet recognize that there are unpleasant idiosyncrasies that can only be endured as a part of the relationship. But the bigger point is that there was a goal and that goal was achieved. Had we not pushed through and made the sacrifices to come here nineteen months ago, I'm not sure how I would be viewing thirty. Maybe it would be what I thought it would be- an unwelcome reminder of time passing by. Had the past ten years not been so full of turmoil, thirty might not feel like such an sweet accomplishment.

Or is this the secret, that there is no secret? That you are all the ages you have ever been? That turning thirty is not so horrible and demeaning after all?