Hi, everyone! Hard to believe, but this is my very last blog post of my twenties. My birthday is on Monday, and I schedule blog posts for Tuesdays and Fridays. So the next time you hear from me, I’ll officially be in my thirties! A brand new decade. I feel ready.

I used to expect that I would feel some anxiety about turning 30. Society makes such a big deal about it, and 30 somehow seems so much older than, say, 28. There’s also the fact that part of me still feels sixteen sometimes, and it is strange for your actual age to progress farther and farther beyond an age you remember being so vividly. At some point, I’ve crossed over from “girl” to “young woman” to, simply, “woman.” How did that happen?

{My sixteenth birthday, with goofy Gar}

But, on the other hand, there are lots of ways that I can tell I have grown. I remember my first semester teaching undergrads at Purdue, just a year out of college myself, and I felt very much in the same demographic check-box as my students. But it does not feel that way now. When Allyn and I visited my cousin Arianna in college last October, I couldn’t get over how young the undergrads seemed. Had we been that young, too? Looking at them and listening to Arianna’s dorm room stories, I felt the same way I feel when my students talk about middle-school PE class: I remember that time in my life and that version of myself so clearly, and yet it feels like I am peering at her through a pane of glass or reading about her in a book. I am not that same Dallas anymore. I have morphed and expanded and grown and learned a lot since then.

Perhaps one of the biggest reasons I am not dreading turning 30 is that my whole perspective on aging shifted forever when Celine died so tragically and brutally young. Now, every birthday feels like such a privilege, such a stroke of luck, such a thing to celebrate. I no longer take birthdays for granted, in a way that was not as true before we lost Celine. I would give up chocolate for the rest of my life if Celine got to turn 30 and 40 and 50 and 60 and get all gray-haired and wrinkly.

{Celebrating her 21st birthday… what a fun night that was!}

So I am utterly stoked that I get to turn 30! What a blessing it is to enter this new chapter of life.

In truth every day is a new beginning; as my brother wisely says, “Every single day is a once-in-a-lifetime experience.” But there is something about birthdays, and particularly about turning over a new leaf of a sparkling new decade here on this planet, that feels exhilarating and shiny.  Yes, my twenties were wonderful in many ways: I lived with three of my best friends, studied abroad in England for six months, graduated college. I moved back home for a year and got to live with my parents again, but in a different way: inhabiting the house as three adults more than two adults and a child. That was such a precious year, to simply be together and soak up time with them, even though I was anxious about my future and what would happen next… and then something did happen, I got into graduate school, and I moved to Indiana and got my MFA in Fiction and learned so much and lived on my own for the first time in my life. I learned to cook and I learned to trudge through the snow and I learned how strong I was. I fell in love and fell to pieces. I went on blind dates and terrible dates and online dates and magical dates. I wrote three novels and one short-story collection and I got a literary agent. I moved to the Bay Area and lived with my grandparents, and they became two of my best friends, and I learned that life is too short but it is also long and will surprise you sometimes in the best way. I fell in love again and knew that this was what I had been searching for, waiting for, dreaming about, always. And, reader, I married him.

So my twenties were glorious, yes. But they were also lonely and painful and searching in many ways. Now, from where I stand on the cusp of thirty, life feels sturdier under my feet. I feel sturdier in myself. I know who I am and what I want and where I am going. Not only can I successfully blow-dry my hair and flip a pancake without making a big mess, I realized the other day that I truly feel happy in my career for the first time in a long time. I feel like I am doing the writing I am supposed to be doing, and I don’t have to prove anything to anyone. No longer am I sweating through criticism in workshops, feeling like I’m not “literary” or “tortured” enough. I am proud of my writing and I no longer feel the need to “prove myself” to anyone else. As novelist Elizabeth Berg once told me: First, please yourself. I finally understand what she meant. I genuinely feel excited to wake up each day and get to work on things, and there are never enough hours in the day to do everything I want to do.

For my tenth birthday, my parents surprised me with a gift I had been begging for and dreaming about: a boxer puppy. Gar would light up my life and expand my world, making me laugh with his goofy antics, sleeping at the foot of my bed most nights, and curling up beside my computer as I wrote stories late into the night. At ten, I would publish my first collection of short stories and poems, and my dream of making a career as a writer would officially be born. I felt like the luckiest girl in the whole world.

For my twentieth birthday, I was home from college for the summer and my family and I flew kites at the park. Gar was no longer in our lives, only in our memories and photographs, and we had a new exuberant boxer puppy on our hands: Mr. Murray. After turning twenty, I would spend a summer abroad at Cambridge and later would study abroad for a whole semester in England, where I turned 21 and it wasn’t even that big of a deal because the drinking age was 18 there. I remember celebrating with Chinese take-out and ice cream, surrounded by my British flatmates, feeling impossibly lucky and impossibly grown-up.

{My roommates threw me a surprise 21st birthday party 8 months before my actual birthday, before we all went abroad. I don’t think I’ve ever been more surprised! It was such a fun party, and so thoughtful of them.}

For my thirtieth birthday, I will be in my favorite place I’ve ever been: my childhood home, with my parents, and my brother, and my husband, and a gray-faced Murray snoring on the couch. I no longer feel impossibly grown-up—there is still so much I have yet to learn. But I don’t feel impossibly young, either. There are some things I have learned. There are some things I know for certain. One of them is how lucky I am. No matter how old I get, I hope I always remember that.

Cheers to 30! I’m all in.

Your turn {if you want}:

Grab your journal or open a new document on your computer, and use these questions as jumping-off points:

• What are some of the highlights from the decades of your life?
• What lessons have you learned in the past 10 years?
• How do you approach birthdays and getting older? What are some of your favorite ways to celebrate?