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we just hit 35 recently and, honestly, the amount our life is better compared to a decade ago (or more) is immeasurable. things never stop keep happening, of course, but we have a support network to help us with the heavy lifting, and enough lived experience to know when to deal with something head-on, when to let something slide off our shoulders, and when we need help. so glad we made it this far, tbh.

i was so psyched to turn 30 and now that i've been here for a year it's like 10/10 met or exceeded all expectations. i know what i want and i'm making steady progress towards it. that's a feeling that i literally never had until my late 20s. adulthood is genuinely fantastic

we might just be in our mid 20s ourselves, but with one single exception things have already improved so much just when we went from early 20s to mid 20s. reminders like this that things only get better from here (which we already see how they will, now that we're finally figuring out roughly what we want) is just. perfect. makes us happy to have made it through that time. we can't wait to see what the next five years will bring, personally.

A tough, but sometimes necessary experience is the number of people who will come and go from your life. So many relationships gone that were contingent on proximity or being in a transitory place. It’s made more surreal when combined with gains, the people who will matter going forward. My instincts were shit, I couldn’t trust I would stay with the right people, but time bore out what I could never have imagined in the nadir of my 20s.

This is SO TRUE, even with a bunch of shitty stuff happening including a global pandemic, my 30s were so much better than my 20s and I'm looking forward to my 40s (starting week after next!) being even better

I was unemployed until i was 24 so the time between that and graduation was the worst part of my life, stuck at home with mom and a judgemental stepdad. Moved out a year after getting the job and have actually been able to Live since then.

SING IT

I can only say I first started having friends in high school at residential nerd school, more in college, got a job and apartment and car and older girlfriend in my mid 20s, had fun adventures in my 30s, figured out I'm trans in my mid-40s, now just over 50, am a girl, and a lesbian, and have tits, and am respected in my job where a director of core lab things just scheduled a meeting with me titled "need Michaela's institutional memory" and, yeah, it's going well.

i was so scared to turn 30 bc i felt ""too old"" but now that im actually there its like god what a RELIEF. tbh my life situation hasnt rlly changed but mentally i just feel more stable. in tour 20s it feels like youre falling behind and failing, in my 30s it feels the same except im allowed to fall behind and fail bc idk tbh!! things just feel better now

To pull from a song from the 90's:

Don't feel guilty if you don't know what you want to do with your life. The most interesting people I know didn't know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives. Some of the most interesting 40-year-olds I know still don't.

A friend put it best when we were feeling bad about just starting to get our shit together in our late twenties and he said, “it’s fine, we’re just 10 year old adults”. Some people know exactly what they want at 18, most people don’t get everything right on the very first try, or spend years trying something to find it isn’t what they want. There’s nothing wrong either way.

I'm better at 30 than I was at nearly any point in my 20s. It's overall better. Adulting still sucks, sure. But.
Things that suck and people that suck no longer became obligations to deal with or "best I got." The longer you stay around the more chances you have of finding the right things and people in your life - the ones who are true friends, the ones you learn from, the ones who elevate who you are instead of just validating (or worse, denigrating under the guise that "friends should shit on each other")... and also and very importantly... get rid of the crappy ones. That's been the theme of my 20s. I keep finding people and things I vibe with to an incredible degree and I'm glad I made it this far.

Also I lost 85 lbs. In 14 months. It helped.

30 and doing so much better but still feeling lost in big ways - this helped to read. thank you