A Millennial Reflects On Her 30's

The year I turned 30 my mom got cancer. Or had cancer. By the time they found it, the cancer was at Stage 4B, which, if you’re unfamiliar, means the cancer is very advanced and is gonna be a real bad time.

Hers was indeed a real bad time.

I spent the first two birthdays of my thirties in Cancerland with her. I was one of her caregivers, helping her to the bathroom, running her errands, picking up her meds, and then twice a month I was her clinic escort when she had chemo at a cancer center 4 hours away from our rural Alabama hometown. I rode the waves of hope and despair with her for 16 months. And then a few weeks after I turned 31 she died.

Then came the grief, which was hard and complicated. Because my mother was not a well person. Our relationship was destructive and volatile. I wasn’t a planned pregnancy, nor was I a welcome one. And it showed in her favoritism, her neglect, and her abuse.

I’d pushed back against it, and her, for years, but it really hit a fever pitch when I turned 15 and it suddenly clicked that this, our violent and manipulative homelife, wasn’t normal. So, I pushed back. Hard. Because once you see, you can’t unsee.

She eventually kicked me out at 18 because I told our pastor about the abuse happening in our home. And that led to a whole plethora of problems that I’ve already written about extensively somewhere on the internet. The point is our relationship was damaged. She’d damaged it from the moment I was born. And the parts she left undamaged I took my own emotional sledgehammer to.

But, she died. She died without saying she was sorry or telling the whole truth. And I was left to piece my life back together again now that she wasn’t in it anymore.

By the time I was 35 I felt like I was starting to come out of it: this complicated, layered grief cloud. I was leaving the house again, trying to make friends again, and I’d rediscovered my love for writing, creating, sharing, and connecting.

And then, I went viral for the first time.

Like most of us, 2020 rocked my little world. My spouse had his own cancer scare, then he lost his job, my grandmother and my uncle passed away, we were broke, desperate for work, without health insurance, and there was a pandemic on. So, I slipped into my bathroom one night, pushed record in my camera app, and cut my bangs. Just so I could feel something. And the internet related to that in a big way. To the tune of 20 million + combined views across multiple apps and platforms.

Thus my career as an internet person began.

But, now my 30’s are drawing to an end. And I’m sitting here in front of a very expensive laptop I bought myself from money I earned writing, and I am both so grateful to be where I am and also still so burdened by the absolute upheaval of my thirties.

Most of my friends are in the same boat: in their thirties, feeling the lurch of time and change, struggling to find their footing, and desperate to understand and be understood. We share memes, and voice notes, and direct messages about the ending of friendships we made in our teens and twenties that no longer feel safe or equal or right for us. We cry about our families, and our marriages, and perimenopause, and infertility, and gray hairs, and sagging tits and balls, and the economy, and about how we’ll never retire, and about the world our kids are growing up in, and it is all so fucking hard.

Because I feel so grown up. And also, still so small.

That’s what my thirties have felt like. Like I’m a little girl in my grandmother’s cherry red high heels, smearing expired Mary Kay makeup from her vanity across my lips, drowning my shoulders in her costume jewelry and scarves. I’m all dressed up to play the part of an adult, but the shoes are too big and there’s lipstick on my teeth.

And yet, here I am. Looking back at a decade of growth, and grief, and disappointment, and overnight success, and I feel both exhausted by it and grateful for it. Some people don’t make it to 30. Nor will they make it to 40. My mom never made it to 60. But I am still here. Sitting on the internet telling my story again for the millionth time because it’s all I know how to do.

It was a hard decade.

It was hard on my body and on my heart. It took two best friends away from me because we were changing but in different directions. It took my mother from me, which in hindsight was a blessing in disguise because as one of my former best friends, who’d known me since high school, said, “the entire time I’ve known you, it’s like you had a sickness, and your mom was the poison causing it.”

It took my fertility from me for good. It challenged my own understanding of motherhood and my role as a mother. It forced me to make big, hard decisions, and pull my big girl panties up as high as they would go when really all I wanted to do was rip them off and go dancing naked in the woods while screeching profanities and curses at all who doubted me. It took almost everything I thought I knew about myself, and my life, and it turned it inside out and made me watch as it picked over the corpse of my mistakes and my memories.

Basically what I’m saying is my thirties kicked my ass. And that is why I am grateful this decade is nearly over.

I don’t know if this is my final form or if my 40’s will spin me up into something even more fantastic and fabulous, but I know myself better today leaving my 30’s than I did when I entered them.

This was the decade I got serious about therapy. This was the decade I got my official diagnoses of PTSD, Depression, Anxiety, and Autism. This was the decade I finally started taking medication to help me live a fuller life and be a more productive “member of society.”

This was the decade I put the work in to build my career. This was the decade I learned to love and forgive myself. So, it wasn’t all bad. Some of it was downright delightful.

But, thankfully, it’s finally almost over. And tonight, I’m raising a pipe to my third decade of life, while I type out these words and ready to send them out into the void once more. I inhale the warmth of the cannabis burning brightly in the bowl and exhale little plumes of smoke, watching them dance away from me, fading away and forgotten almost instantly.

I’m also raise my pipe to my fellow thirty-something Millennials, acutely aware that we are somehow still too old and too young to be taken seriously.

However, we are still alive. We’ve survived this far. So, I guess we’ll hang in there a little longer and see what our forties hold. Hopefully it will be slightly less world-imploding. (Don’t ruin it for me if you’re already there. I’d like to be surprised.)