Turning 30 With Nothing Checked Off My List Was the Best Thing That Happened to Me

I had been carrying the list since I was about 22 - not written down anywhere but fully formed and frequently consulted internally. By 30 I would be in a senior role, in a committed relationship heading toward marriage, living in a city I had chosen deliberately, with a clear sense of direction about the next decade.

These were not outrageous ambitions and I had worked toward them with genuine effort. When I turned 30 in Vellore, none of them were checked off in the way the list had specified. I was in a role that was good but not senior.

I was single in a way that was chosen but not fully settled. I was living in the city of my childhood for reasons that were circumstantial more than deliberate.

And I had a sense of direction that was clearer than it had been at 22 and considerably less certain than the list had assumed it would be.

The week before my birthday I had a quality of low-grade distress that I recognised, when I examined it, as grief for a version of 30 that I had been promised by an internal timeline I had never consciously agreed to. The grief was real.

It was also, I came to understand over the following month, primarily about the gap between an imagined life and a real one rather than anything wrong with the real one.

The imagined life at 30 had been assembled at 22 from a combination of ambient social expectations, comparison to peers whose lives were visible, and a fairly limited understanding of what any of these things would actually feel like to have.

The real life at 30 had been built through the actual experience of being alive, making choices with incomplete information, and discovering, slowly, what I genuinely wanted rather than what I had assumed I would want. The reframe did not arrive immediately or through any single insight.

It arrived through a series of conversations with friends who were also at or near 30 and who were also, in different configurations, not where the list had said they should be.

What I found in those conversations was that almost nobody had arrived where they had projected and that the arrivals they had made - different, stranger, more specific to who they had become - were better fits than the projections would have been.

The list had been built for a person who had not yet lived. By 30 I had lived enough to know that person would not have been me.