memory box

reflecting on my twenties in the wake of turning 30

May 02, 2025

Fifteen years ago, when I was half my age and I was trying to convince my parents to let me create a Tumblr account, I became obsessed with the idea of living on my own. I felt trapped in my hometown, stuck in a house with a bunch of people who didn’t really understand me, confined to a life that made me feel small. I built up this idea in my head of who I’d be when I moved out, imagining the places I’d go, the books I’d read, the stories I’d write. I remember feeling so fully formed as a teenager, and I thought I was ready to claim my adulthood.

At the time, it felt like an impossible dream.

In high school and college, I became consumed by the question “How do you grow up?” I’d see people online who became adults overnight, moving out or choosing a career or embodying an unshakeable confidence. It seemed instantaneous, and I always felt like I’d missed a class on how to manage this adult world. Did everyone else already learn about insurance and applying for an apartment and buying a car? Why are some people better at self-love than others? Who was I supposed to bribe to get them to make me feel like a grown up? I was so terrified all the time of having to do things without my mom holding my hand. (Still am sometimes.)

But I knew who I was. I maybe didn’t know how to achieve my dreams, or how to be a real adult, but at least I knew what I wanted out of life. I wanted to be an artist. I wanted to be independent. I wanted that life I dreamed up when I was fifteen.

People talk all the time about “coming of age,” and they convince us that by we’re “of age” by the time we outgrow our teenage years, by the time we start drinking at (the very American) twenty-one, by the time our brains are “fully developed” at twenty-five. I thought your coming of age happened in high school. That in college you’d just know things. About the world, about being an adult, about yourself. I thought that when I turned twenty I’d know exactly who I was, know exactly what I wanted out of my life. In fact, when I was sixteen someone told me that I was lucky I wouldn’t have to spend my twenties figuring out who I am because I was already so sure of myself and my identity. I was elated! I thought I was ahead of the curve!

But you know what they say, eventually the curve becomes a sphere and you start falling behind, and sometimes growing up precocious means never growing up at all. Or whatever.

It’s kind of poetic that the pandemic started a few months before I turned 25. It split my twenties in half. BC and AC.

I spent the first half of my twenties building up to this climax, working hard on my own business, absolutely certain of my identity. Some of the greatest experiences of my life happened before my twenty-fifth birthday, and to this day I don’t know how I got so lucky. I did impossible things, the stuff of bucket-lists. And even when I struggled, when I panicked, when I ended up staring at the ceiling, I knew who I was.

So, I quit my day-job in January of 2020. I was on a freelance high, expecting to have my biggest year ever that summer and fall, and then by June I had accepted (like everybody else), that my dreams were dead in the water. It felt like rock bottom at the time, but it wasn’t until I turned 26 that I felt like everything truly came crashing down around me.

How much of this was because of a global pandemic and how much of this is the universal mid-twenties experience, I will never know, but everything changed for me. I was lucky, all things considered, because even at my lowest, I was still incredibly privileged, but even now, those years haunt me. It felt like its own kind of death, giving up on the dreams and ambitions I had in my early twenties. I became a minimum-wage barista, I stopped creating art, I spent most of my time skipping meals and panicking over money. I cried a lot.

I felt my aspirations slipping away from me, and even though I grieved them, I didn’t have the capacity to change anything, so I became indifferent to my sorrow. I ran away from the life I was trapped in. The pendulum swung in the other direction, and I became someone I didn’t recognize, someone I’d never met before. I was in my mid-twenties but for the first time in my life, I had a teenage-dream summer, complete with bar-hopping and late-night Sonic debriefs and a situationship (friendship. let me be clear.) that may or may not have involved a guy who did cocaine. I reveled in the chaos. I felt like I was finally living, and it thrilled me. I pretended like I wasn’t terrified, even though everything was slipping through my fingers.

For a long time, I felt cheated. Like all of us. What would my twenties have looked like if 2020 played out like a normal year? What would my twenties have been like if each of those three the elections played out differently? Who would I be today, turning 30, if I hadn’t lost so much, if I hadn’t been forced to befriend grief? If I got everything I wanted, back when I wanted it so badly?

The funny thing is, grief is the answer to the question. How do you grow up? You lose. You change. You mourn. Coming of age never stops really, I think that is the proof of a well-lived life, that you’re always coming of age, always learning, always evolving. But the very first step is loss. It’s the quickest way to grow. It makes you human in ways that other things can’t.

Even with all the joy I lived in this decade of my life, I would not be who I am without the grief. I am stronger now, braver. I’m more comfortable in my skin and in the world at large. I have more gratitude, more patience, more compassion. But that’s only because I didn’t get what I wanted. Instead, I had hard conversations. I had to face myself head-on, no bullshit. I had to see a therapist. I had to accept that I would never live the life of my dreams.

Ironically, the other things they say are true too: if you love it, you have to let it go, and the things we lose have a way of coming back to us in the end.

Coming of age is a gradual thing. It takes thirty years. It creeps up on you. It isn’t something you can rush, something you participate in actively. Your coming of age will find you when you least expect it. It will taking things from you. It will terrify you. It will fake you out, make you believe that in order to get where you want to be, you have to give up everything. And you will open your hands and let go because you have no other choice.

But here’s the secret I’ve learned. Life is like an ocean tide. It rolls in, it rolls out, it rolls back in. Sometimes it takes time, sometimes the message in a bottle you send out will never find its way back to you, but sometimes the water rushes back in and you find versions of yourself that you lost when you were young. You may never get to stand in the same river twice, may never get to return to the ocean that cradled you as a child, but the pieces of you that were buried there do not die. You can dig them up whenever you want.

It feels like a special kind of magic that after a decade of dreaming, of stumbling, of screaming at the top of my lungs, I am standing face to face with the life I wanted so desperately when I was fifteen. After the turmoil of the last few years, I am flabbergasted to find myself back on track. (Of course, the track is different now and so am I, but that’s okay.) I know what a privilege that is, what an absolute fucking gift.

I live in a big city in my own apartment, and in the mornings the sun will stream through the windows and I will think, This is bliss, even as I moan and groan and wish that I didn’t have to participate in capitalism. There is peace when I listen to that new album on my drive to work, watching the sunlight dance through the trees. When I get a message from a potential client who responds to my email with If you’re available, I think it would be a dream to have you! When I book another flight to another city I’ve never been to, when I dance around my bedroom to that new song I love, when I look in the mirror and I don’t hate myself anymore.

This dream life is about the physical, about the space I live in and the things I get to do, but it’s also about my inner self. I spent so much time wishing I could be a photographer, longing to live alone, that I never really wasted time thinking about how it would feel. I never thought to wish away my romantic yearning for a partner. I never imagined I could look in the mirror after a shower and love my body so tenderly. I never understood that the dream I longed for wasn’t a place, but it was a version of myself, a mindset, a belief.

What I longed for at fifteen was to bear witness to myself and not shy away. To not want to change a single thing about my appearance, my interests, my heart. To be content with what I am, let alone what I have or what I’m doing. I just never knew that was something I could ask for, something I could achieve. That was more impossible than becoming a freelance photographer. Than moving seven hours away from my parents. Than rebuilding my life in the wake of a global pandemic.

And yet. Here I am. And what a miracle it is to be satisfied with my very self.

These days I feel like every version of myself. I am me at fifteen, staying up way too late scrolling on Tumblr dot com. I am me at eighteen, daydreaming about seeing Taylor Swift in concert. I am me at twenty, road-tripping across the country to visit my favorite people. I am me at twenty-two, staring at the ceiling wondering when the heat will subside and my summer depression will disappear. I am me at twenty-five, reading the news in terror. I am me at twenty-six, clinging to my friends for dear life, looking for god at the climbing gym, drowning in my grief. I am me at twenty-eight, rediscovering the things I used to love. I am me at thirty, grateful to be alive, honoring every person I used to be, knowing that tomorrow this version of me will become an archive and a museum and a memorial.

Since nobody else is going to worship my life or my self, I have to do it. Even if I’m the only person who cares about this museum, it’s mine, and I am going to cherish it. So let’s be a little dramatic and over the top1 and silly and take a walk down memory lane because why else did I spend the last ten years documenting if not to share it all on the internet?

I’m so fucking lucky to be here. I don’t take it for granted.

(Also yeah, sorry, this is obnoxious and super long and excessive and yes I am bragging and you should all be jealous.)

2015 - Give

“Mine” by Phoebe Ryan

“Happiness, true happiness, is so fleeting and so rare that you have to understand what in life makes you happy. And, you know, when that feeling happens, you have to really live in that moment, you have to be in that moment. Every ounce of you has to be present in that moment…I think when that moment’s over, whatever it is that makes you happy, you can’t let it really be over, you have to just memorize every part of it. And then, when you’re having a bad day or a sad day or a gray day or a boring day and you can’t seem to find happiness, you have to pull out that memory that you have of that time you were so happy.”
— Taylor Swift (Enchanted/Wildest Dreams Speech, Nashville Night 1 9/25/15)

Arguably the biggest thing to happen to me in 2016 was meeting LMM and seeing the OBC of *Hamilton…*

2016 - Growth

“I Wanna Get Better” by Bleachers

“There are good days and hard days for me—even now. Don’t let the hard days win.”
— A Court of Mist and Fury by SJM

My high school best friend / parabatai and I are celebrating fifteen years of being besties this fall and every day I am so thankful to have her in my corner!!

One of the habits I developed in my early twenties when I started art journalling was to write a letter to future me every December. I skipped Dec 2020 going into 2021, but otherwise I’ve been doing it every year since 2016.

2017 - Discipline

“Joanne” by Lady Gaga

“I’ve been walking circles
Lost on Sunday morning
Tryna find my way back home
Cause I know I’ve been a stranger lately
I’ve been a stranger lately”
— “Foreign Girls” by Bleachers

I saw 14 shows in NYC in my twenties (most of those with Mom) but nothing will compare to the time we flew to New York for 12 hours to see this show before it closed :,)

Don’t judge 22 yr-old me for some of these but let’s celebrate this 30 before 30 list because I really did accomplish so many things on here!! And a lot of what I didn’t accomplish is irrelevant now! *(Red is completed, green is in progress or will be completed soon, yellow I did not achieve)*

2018 - Consistency

“Third Eye” by Florence + the Machine

"So, in a sense, I guess you could say it looks like the same thing over and over again, but that’s not insanity. Out there on the streets, that’s insanity. So that’s what recovery is. It’s the same thing over and over again in spite of the results or in spite of a backslide or in spite of a full-fledged fucking relapse. Doesn’t mean you stop just because you get repetitive. One day at a time."
— The Haunting of Hill House (2018)

still the happiest day of my life 🫶🏻 6️⃣2️⃣8️⃣

2019 - Change

“Karma” by AJR

“To get out, he only needed to look in. Because in was out. To keep power you give it away. It doesn't take violence to kill evil. It takes good."
— Imaginary Friend by Stephen Chbosky

had my first (and only) book signing in FINLAND

Sometimes I forget I self-published a poetry collection at 24 but I still get royalties from this book (it’s like $4 every six months but it’s still cool)

2020 - Enough

“Level of Concern” by Twenty One Pilots

“That's the point of it. Of life. To live, to love, knowing that it might all vanish tomorrow. It makes everything that much more precious.”
— House of Earth and Blood by SJM

Favorite thing about this tattoo is that when I told my best friend about it, she claimed I was the bravest person she knew for getting a tattoo in May of 2020 in the heat of the pandemic! (Art by Frani, Tattooing by True Eden)

2021 - Belief

“Reasons Not to Die” by Ryn Weaver

"Wasn’t friendship its own miracle, the finding of another person who made the entire lonely world seem somehow less lonely?"
— A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

The older I get the more I believe this manuscript will die unpublished, but damn if this wasn’t a major highlight of my 20s.

My 27th birthday, celebrating at a friend’s condo in Florida

2022 - Fearless

“I Don’t Know You Like I Used To” by mercury.

“It’s finished, it’s done. You can’t take loved away.”
— Nona the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

2023 - Self

“Sunchoke” by Aly & AJ

“Humans are never gonna be perfect. The best we can do is to keep asking for help and accepting it when we can. And if you keep on doing that, you’ll always be moving towards better.”
— Ted Lasso (2020-2023)

2024 - Connect

“Backslide” by Twenty One Pilots

“You Vishai talk a lot about love and selflessness. How important it is to love others, sacrifice for others, put the happiness of others before your own. But do you know what I have learned in all my years? And don’t let my appearance fool you. I’m older than I look. I’ve learned that all that sounds sweet but means very little if you’ve never learned to love yourself. You are allowed—no, you are entitled—to think of your own health and safety first. Someone has taught you that you aren’t worth the same love you would give a stranger. That someone deserves to be slapped quite hard.”
— The House of Always by Jenn Lyons