30

Me not 30. Taken April 21, 2018 in Joshua Tree, CA.

99% of the time I forget my age. My mindset has simply refused to mature and as my friends get married, prepare to have children, I’m still trying to figure out how to make macaroni and cheese in one pot whilst navigating the dating world. It isn’t until something on my body changes when I realize how old I actually am. The other day I got out of the shower, wrapped a towel around me and started brushing my teeth. As I was preparing for bed, I looked at myself in the mirror. Sure, I don’t have a wrinkle on my face but when you inherit a round baby face from your youthful looking father, it’s hard to develop wrinkles even if you smoked a pack of cigarettes every day. I did, however, spot something shiny in the bed of dark, coarse hair that lays atop my head. With closer inspection, I realized it wasn’t glare from my shiny locks but rather a gray hair poking through the darkness. As I shifted my hair around, I found more stray grays trying to reach the top of my head so they can finally be seen.

Grays aren’t the only thing that have changed on me—stretching is no longer an option as much as a requirement. My back gets tight and the best relief is when I do a nice stretch to get the knots out. My breasts no longer have the same lift as they did five years ago, but to be fair gravity has put a huge damper on that to begin with so not a whole lot has been lost in that regard. Staying awake past ten on a weekend becomes more of a chore with each passing month and my memory that was once as sharp as a Ginsu knife is slowly dulling into a spoon.

With all these changes occurring, I still feel unfulfilled. I once had dreams working in the film industry, becoming an auteur like all my other favorite directors. The dreams got dashed away when any connection I had fell through and the impossible feat of trying to get a gig as simple as a PA. When the Weinstein accusations came out, I began to question if this was an industry I really wanted to be in. Was my dream worth more than the toxic environment I would find myself in? An industry that already has a reputation of chewing you up and spitting you out is also filled with gross, predatory men? I know I still want to write in some capacity, which is why I’m focusing more on essays. I would love to do this full time and hopefully one day I will. It’s sometimes hard to justify my dreams as every one else I know has a career or is close to getting a career and I’m still here, at a dead-end office job, writing on the side as it is one of the few things in my life that gives me fulfillment, a sense of purpose. It’s worth waking up in the morning for, and has become therapeutic. I’m terrible at talking about my feelings or opening up in any capacity. I’ve always found it so easy to put my feelings onto paper, which is why many of these entries get personal. Friends have told me they’re surprised how personal I get, but it’s just easy to write out what’s going on in my head rather than verbalize it with a friend. Writing allows me to streamline my stream-of-conscious thoughts, understand the weird idiosyncrasies in my life, the everyday problems of the world. I know there’s a small audience that reads these entries, and if I know these people in person they’re kind enough to not say anything about them to me to my face. I appreciate it, as it lets me continue to write without judgment so I can continue to be as honest as possible with myself. I put my thoughts down and release it into the world. If I don’t think about anyone and everyone reading it, it feels like a diary entry for my eyes only almost.

There are three men in my life that I have had romantic interest in, meant the world to me, and in some cases became an unhealthy obsession. This year I've had to come to grips with accepting that these men are no longer in my life either due to hurt feelings, my ego, or simply no longer living in the same state as me. The hardest one to accept is the man I had the healthiest relationship with moving away. I still haven’t come to terms with it. Sometimes I have good days where I barely think about him, other days a song will come on and I don’t want to come out of my room as I lay in bed, longing for his presence, wishing his arms were wrapped around me like a warm blanket, with his face nuzzled in my neck. He seems well, I’m sure he hasn’t thought about me since he moved. I don’t make the effort to talk to him because it will just make it that much harder for me to move on, but I miss him. I don’t think he’ll ever know how much I miss him and I prefer it that way. I never want him to know how vulnerable I feel about his absence. Turning 30 without these three men in my life will be a good way to leave the past where it belongs—in the past. I’ll get to start off on a clean slate and begin to look forward to whatever lies ahead. I can get rid of my excess baggage and unnecessary hang ups.

Maybe my life isn’t what I envisioned it would be at thirty when I was thinking about my future as a fifteen year old girl. I’m still struggling to figure everything out, but I don’t think age will fix the whole ‘I-have-no-idea-what-the-hell-I-am-doing’ thing, but at least experience will help me make less stupid decisions. Well, at least that’s what I’m hoping. I’ve grappled with the fact that my body is slowly changing as it rots at a slug’s pace. I can live with the soreness, saggy tits and one day in the near future getting my first wrinkle but I have no shame in getting older. The scattered grays in my hair signify what I’ve been through thus far: love, death, depression and eight seasons of Dexter. These white hairs are battle scars that show I have a timeline that’s still running, experiences still waiting in the wings to be fully realized, dreams that are aching to come true.

Instead of yanking out the gray hairs I found on my head, I shifted my hair to reveal the bits of white that have developed in my dark brown hair, giving these hairs a chance to be seen, to broadcast what these hairs have seen and what remains to be seen.