In a few months (March 7, 2026) I will be turning 30. In so many ways, I expected this birthday would mark something. It's thirty, after all. The birthday for sitcom friends having a midlife crisis. A birthday away from your 20s, an entrance into your adult life. A birthday when you're expected to be in some kind of committed relationship, married, maybe even starting a family. Maybe you put a down payment on a house, and set your sights on a blossoming career.
That's not where I will be this March, and I am pleasantly surprised with that reality. I will be turning 30 with complete control of my healing. For me, that is more than enough.
Psychologists have found that your brain does not fully develop until at least age 25, maybe even closer to 30. Studies show that even after your brain is fully developed, you can still learn new skills, develop new talents, and shift aspects of your personality and mindset. It is by no means a cutoff, but it is in many ways-- for me at least-- a marker in my life.
Over the past decade, I am grown and developed into a woman I never believed I could be. I will forever be amazed at how resilient I am, how I have pulled myself up and out of the worst case scenarios a hundred times over. I have discovered more peace than I ever believed possible.
Part of this is due to having to speed run healing over the past couple of years-- because two years ago, I did have this aging crisis. When I turned 28, I ran headfirst into crisis. I was so incredibly confused with the world around me. I grappled with the world, a world seemingly glossing over that whole global pandemic we had in our own backyards. I grappled with a world where a tiny country in the middle east was in the most deadly war we had seen in a lifetime. And halfway around the world, here I was left losing friends because of it. A world where I was turning 28, with grandparents and friends who would never see another day. I wished so intensely that I could turn back time.
That's the thing about time: it keeps moving forward. It always moves forward, whatever decisions we make and whatever growth we do or do not engage in. I needed to make the active choice to heal.
Healing is so much easier said than done. If you had asked me in February 2024 if I was healed, I would have emphatically shouted that I was. Look at me, I would say. I am teaching preschool, and enrolled in a Masters program for expressive arts therapy. Never mind that the program was pulling loose old wounds, with classmates who were somehow even more radical than I was. Look at me, I would say. I have so many friends. Never mind that I was living in codependency, and tolerating toxic people because I was too afraid to be alone. Look at me, I would say. And it was true. I looked good.
And three days of no sleep led to a crisis that drove me to the ER and locked me into a 5150 hold. I was left beholden to doctors who didn't think to offer me pen and paper when I refused to speak, nurses who didn't think to call my psychiatrist to see what medications I was supposed to be taking. I ate cold, soggy meals in packaged cardboard and collapsed, over and over again.
I don't know when I realized something needed to change. I needed to cut off people who drained all my energy. I needed to process my grief, the grief of losing my Bubbie and the overdue grief of losing my best friend. I needed to admit this masters program was no longer perfect for me, that the classes I was taking were not beneficial to my mental health. I needed to admit I never wanted to be a therapist. I needed, more than anything else, to heal from all that I had lost.
I did heal, over and over again. With every time limit block set on my social media, with each email to my professors telling them I could not continue. Every night I bathed, and took my medications, and flipped through my DBT binder-- through it all, I continued to heal.
And soon, I will be thirty. I have aged into myself, built up maturity and emotional awareness and learned the mundane duties of adulthood. I have learned to care for myself, and to ask for help. I am grown, I am wise, I am healing.
With any luck, I will continue to grow. I will be everything my mentally ill younger self dreamed she would never be. I will be happy, and confident, and grown up.
And that is exactly where I want to be.
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