Thoughts on Turning 32
Entering My Prime (Bloody Confused)
Last week I turned 32.
And honestly, I hadn’t intended to write this post until my partner encouraged me — saying posts like these are the ones that connect.
So if you’ll allow me to be real for a moment, I’m 32 and most days I feel I’ve got nothing figured out.
I struggle with climate anxiety. Constant injuries. Deep-seated insecurities about being enough to be an artist. The idea of whether to have children, what career to undertake, the deep aching in my chest of being away whilst my family and friends grow up, making lives for themselves in Australia.
Breath.
I left on a bottomless trip to South America, with a beige plan to be away for a year. It’s been four and a half years.
I’ve lived, loved and changed.
Somewhere along the way, I discovered I no longer desired the life I once worked so hard for. I became a teacher, and I remember the starkness of realising this wasn’t who I was — I didn’t care about titles, chancing the safety of a stable job and or settling within myself.
To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with wanting any of those things, and part of me wishes I did. Except that wouldn’t be me being honest.
I care about feeling things with my entire chest.
Living wild and free.
Creating and dedicating myself to art.
But I do wonder what I’m doing with my life. I’ve been gone so long now that I don’t even remember my own zip code. On the good days, it feels good, and on the bad days, you notice the difference.
The feeling is almost like this hollow, weeping that exists within your bones. My bones feel fragile. Collected as a figment of what once was.
But didn’t I want to teach? To write? Didn’t I want to contribute in some way?
On certain days, it feels wasteful, almost like I’m being selfish. And other days it felt like exactly what I’m meant to be doing. I’ve never quite been able to reconcile that.
Every life choice we make comes with consequences we can’t envision.
I just thought I’d be further along in life by now. Having more wins than losses.
I might want you to convince me this is all okay. That these feelings are all experiences of leaving behind a well-lived youth
I work with a girl who has just turned 18; we share the same birthday. The other day, she mentioned we were birthday twins. I said not quite. I’m, after all, 12 years older than you.
‘Aren’t you born in 1994?’
‘Yeah, so?’
‘That’s 14 years.’
And it struck me, because it feels like just last week I was 18. Sitting around with people who to this day remain mates, and others who have long since departed.
I laughed and eventually came to a smile of sorts. As 14 years flashed in front of my eyes.
All of which to say, my life’s both the best it’s ever been and in the same breath the most challenging.
I’m not finding success, but I’m making art.
I’m making less money than I’ve ever made, but I like my job.
I’m in love in the kind of way that is healing.
I’m constantly questioning if I’m on the right path, but the best trips I’ve ever taken are the ones without a bloody path.
The Irish Poet David Whyte once wrote:
“How do you know that you are on your path – because it disappears. That’s how you know.”
David Whyte
And I say all that to say, at 32, I’m not ready to have all the things I’ve dreamed of since I was a kid.
I just never want this adventure to end. You know?
"Midway in our life's journey, I went astray / from the straight road and woke to find myself / alone in a dark wood / . . .How I came to it I cannot rightly say, / So drugged and loose with sleep had I become."
That's how Dante starts Inferno. He was 35 years old, half-way through the "Christian" life-span of 70. The allegory could be read as strictly religious; that Dante has strayed from a life of virtue and has fallen into sin. Or, you could read it as more secular –that a now 30-something Dante is waking up to a life riddled with promise but also broken dreams, a non-existent career, and an uncertain future. He was an exile, an artist, a political visionary . . .and at this time lost in his life. Sometimes that feeling is scary. Dante, in his poem, after all, has to travel to Hell and back. But I think sometimes that feeling can be inspirational, being in the dark wood can lend us wisdom (Virgil does come to Dante there!) . . .I'm not saying you'll write something as good as the Divine Comedy, but I think Dante used the same feelings that you're experiencing and describing in this essay to attend to his art.