Thirty-One Ways To Be Brave

My thirty-first birthday is on Sunday. I’m having a little brunch at my house that will, I hope, involve a cake made out of donuts and some sunshine like we had over the weekend. I’ve ordered a new octopus shirt and have made a stop at Display and Costume for those really classy plastic wineglasses with detachable bottoms because clearly being in my thirties has upped my appreciation for the finer things in life. It’s finally starting to be spring and I am, in general, a big fan of my birthday so I’m feeling pretty good about the whole thing.

I’m definitely living in my head a lot lately but I don’t find myself obsessing about everything I haven’t done the way I was last year. I guess it’s one of the benefits of a non-milestone birthday, that I don’t have to fret about wasting my youth anymore. The new number will feel a little weird; I started saying I was thirty around the time I turned twenty-nine and I have felt very comfortable with such a nice round number. I got used to thirty. Twenty-nine and twenty-eight (uh, and maybe twenty-seven and twenty-six and so on and so forth) are difficult for me to think about without getting really sad and angry with myself, but my birthday last year marked the beginning of some really good times for me, some big clarifications and understandings and some small but important triumphs, and I guess I’ve become fond of it. I have high hopes for thirty-one but of course it’s hard to know what it will bring. I will miss it a little.

Here’s what I wrote about what I wanted from my thirties, this time last year:

Here’s what I want in the next ten years: More love. More creativity in every area of my life. More good conversations with people I love. More goat cheese and more Ruby Red grapefruits. More comfort in my heart. More sleep-overs at the ABL. More friends and more family. More traveling. More pedicures. More risk-taking and more willingness to fail. More certainty. More stupid fake accents. More ambition and more determination. More trust. More kittens. More karaoke. More riding my bike and more dancing. More staying up late and more sleeping in. More really pretty jewelry and more books in my bookshelves. More gorgeousness. More parties. More knowledge about and more usefulness to the community and…hell, while I’m being cheesy, I may as well go for it…and to the world. More feather boas and fake tattoos. More of everything I haven’t had enough of yet, more being exactly what I am and nothing else.

My thirtieth year did in fact bring me many of those things (especially the goat cheese and grapefruits) and it’s all still true; I still want all of that. It’s been a year in which I allowed myself to want a little more than what I had, where I finally picked my head up from the insecurity and doubt and general torpor of my twenties and decided that I would make my life. I have felt some of the short term- ramifications of that decision already, sort of to my surprise. The longer-term ramifications remain to be seen, and I can’t begin to imagine what I will be like when I am thirty-two or thirty-three. I know my twenty-nine year old self would barely recognize me today.

I want to become even more unrecognizable as I get older, and so what I want specifically from my thirty-first year is bravery. I’ve been trying to write a second sentence of this paragraph for three days now and all I can come up with is “I want to be brave.” There’s a sentence I want to write about living in not fear, exactly, but in sort of not-very-challenging-comfort that makes the days and weeks go by and makes you wonder, exactly, what the point of being alive is sometimes. There’s another one I want to write about living in the world versus living in my head and how it’s a lot harder to live in the world, to be here now, right here and right now. And maybe there’s one about being what you are and loving what you have but also trying to be more and different and better than what you currently are and still loving what you have anyway. I can’t write those sentences though so all I will say is this: I hope my thirty-first year brings me thirty-one more things I’ve been wanting, thirty-one chances to change my life, thirty-one ways to be brave.