I dreaded turning 30, but I feel more myself than ever before

“Perhaps if you’re incredibly well-adjusted you’ll sail through this milestone birthday unscathed but for myself, many friends and countless strangers on the internet, turning 30 provokes an incessant onslaught of life reevaluation.”

Last month, two days before my birthday, I was sitting in bed eating an extravagant McDonald’s order for one (a cheeseburger with a steamed bun and extra pickles, six chicken McNuggets, large chips, a McFlurry and two beverages, if you must know) and I was weeping. I wasn’t drunk or hungover, as you might expect for a scene of this kind; it was the middle of the day and I was working from home, hunched over my laptop and attempting to type through heaving sobs.

The cause of this hysterical emotional outburst and fast food binge? My impending 30th birthday. For the majority of the prior month, I’d been in a sort of slow-motion car crash of a meltdown. I was surveying every aspect of my life – career, friendships, dating, my meagre savings account, health and fitness, my wardrobe – and finding almost every category wanting in some way. But instead of falling back on the practical coping mechanisms I’d spent the majority of my twenties honing, I’d devolved into full-blown self-destruction mode.

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The transition from your twenties to the big 3-0 is a peculiar time. Perhaps if you’re incredibly well-adjusted you’ll sail through this milestone birthday unscathed but for myself, many friends and countless strangers on the internet, turning 30 provokes an incessant onslaught of life reevaluation.

Friends (and at least 100 girls you went to high school with whose ecstatic engagement updates or ultrasound Facebook posts you silently peruse) are making life-changing, irreversible decisions. They’re buying their first (in some cases second!) homes, having a baby (in some cases their second or third!!), marrying, proposing and ascending the career ladder 100 rungs at a time. Some are even going through a divorce, for Christ’s sake, all while I’m still having mind-numbing dating app conversations with men who have the witty repartee of a wet blanket.

The great irony of this pre-birthday crisis is that now I’m 30, I feel better about myself and where I’m at in life than I have in a long time. Like many life milestones and occurrences that keep us up at night, the fear you experience before them is much more debilitating than the reality. We live in a culture steeped in ageism – a culture that tells us, particularly women, that our twenties are our glory days.

We’ll never be so lithe and healthy, so filled with collagen, so immune to hangovers, so ‘no strings attached’, so sexually and romantically viable. But I call bullshit. My twenties were drenched in self-doubt, extreme anxiety and poor decision-making. I poured too much time into men that thought very little of me and, particularly for the latter half of my twenties, worked my ass off to be where I am in my career. It was a time of hustling to the point of burnout and partying to the point of oblivion. I cared too much about what others thought and not enough about what made me happy.

Would I change anything? Sure, a few things here and there (some particularly cringe-inducing interactions with the other sex come to mind), but I also had truly incredible amounts of fun. I put myself in rooms I felt I didn’t belong in, I spoke on stages I was sure I had no business being on, at events I was certain I didn’t belong at, and I made incredible strides self-development-wise.

Pre-30, I was bogged down in all that my life was lacking: a serious, loving relationship, a robust savings account, property, investments, a book deal, my own wildly successful podcast and a Fendi Baguette Bag. But post-30, the haze has cleared. I have the type of deep, life-altering (and lifelong) female friendships that Dolly Alderton made her name writing about.

I have good health, a family that’s always in my corner and a line of work that allows me to write about my favourite lip balm, a sex toy and my dating life all in the same week. As an editor, I have the privilege of platforming stories and writers I believe we need to hear more of, and I work with the silliest, smartest group of women in all of Australasia (or the world, I reckon).

To bring in my thirties, I had a house party where everyone I loved spent almost the entirety of the night glued to the dancefloor. I realised that night that I felt sexier, more secure and more myself than I’d ever felt before. So if you’re almost 30, I’m here to assure you the rumours are decidedly untrue; you spend your twenties building and breaking, learning and regretting, feeling too much and too little all at the same time. It can be fun, but it can also be a living hell.

Your thirties? That’s where you get to keep what you like, discard what you don’t and lean into a more fully realised version of yourself. And really, is there anything more attractive than that? Leonardo DiCaprio and his insidious bar chart be damned; being in my thirties is already more fruitful than all of my twenties combined.

For more on navigating turning 30, head here.