A reflection on birthdays

When I was in my early twenties, my thirties felt like an enemy. I blame the industry I work in and a larger societal pressure I felt growing up, where by thirty you were meant to have “it all figured out”. As I got closer and closer to thirty, I sprinted to win an impossible career race I had self-manufactured so that I could be thirty, flirty and thriving.

All actors are a little bit of attention whores to varying degrees (sorry ya’ll we are!). So even though the reality of being famous in today’s context sounds more dangerous than appealing to me - would I love to have some sort of profile written about me and my body of work in a major publication that is accompanied with glossy photos where I look fabulous, so that then I can publish these images on my instagram and receive a bunch of fire emoji comments from friends? Yes of course! Is that an arbitrary, hollow and subjective marker of success? Absolutely! But this is what I wanted before I turned thirty. I wanted to be in some “30 under 30” list. Actually any list please! I wanted everyone to know I was doing “well”. Maybe not even “well”, I just wanted everyone to know I was doing something with my life. But then something devastating happened! As I turned twenty-nine, I realized the dream wasn’t going to happen. I was going to lose the race against myself.

So as my thirtieth birthday loomed closer, I was surprised to notice that instead of dread there was…relief. In fact, because I had made my panties into such a bunch (that’s the expression right?) about turning thirty, and what my life needed to look like, and who I needed to be, once the day actually happened it sort of felt… liberating. I had not accomplished my highly unrealistic and superficial expectations. The expiry date I put on my life that had me fully convinced I was gonna either cease to exist when I turned thirty or everyone I knew was going to crowd around me and point and say “Failure! Failure! Failure!” like I was in my very own version of The Crucible (where a worse fate than being accused of witchcraft was having a little bit of stability but not quite enough to say I’ve “made it''). But none of that happened. None of it. I was free!!!

When I turned thirty I felt like I was finally unlocking some sort of Sailor Moon montage energy. I cannot accurately describe the release I felt in my body. It took me a decade to realize that I had been living as if there was a ticking time bomb up my butt. I woke up on my thirtieth birthday and I was finally able to breathe. I thought: The worst has happened. I am a woman in the world who is thirty years old. Nothing can hurt me! I still exist! I still have thoughts! And more importantly no one can tell me I can’t have cake for dinner except my very own digestive system!

Finally the ticking time bomb was out of my ass! It felt like a rebirth. I was wiser now. I had gone to therapy! I vowed to never be mean to myself again and I evaluated what success actually meant for me. I was looking forward to my third decade on this little rock in the universe with a new-found optimism. All this felt like I had finally been bitten by the radioactive spider - watch out world I was finally going to live!

Cut to now: I’m freshly thirty-two… I’ve come down from the Sailor Moon montage high and that ticking time bomb up has found its way up my butt again, baby. Only now I’m racing against forty. A new year and here I still am… The last five years have felt simultaneously like twenty years and only one year has passed. I blame a global pandemic and two major union strikes (that were important and necessary but boy oh boy did a number on the Canadian entertainment industry). It’s taken me this long to realize I was caught in a riptide for all that time. I’ve only just resurfaced gasping for air and now I worry another five years will go by and another wave will come crashing down and I won’t have a lifejacket to keep me afloat.

Recently, at my birthday gathering, we discussed milestone birthdays. There seemed to be a consensus about the end of decade feeling scary, whereas the beginning of a new one feeling exciting. As friends left that night I thought about how we all struggled with this. It is entirely up to me whether the next eight years will feel as shaky and anxious as my twenties. I have no control over the societal horrors of this present time but I do have control over how I choose to cope with them. And while I’m not twenty-two anymore, I’m realizing the unrealistic list that that twenty-two-year-old made is still holding me hostage. She still wants that cover story!!! How embarrassing.

It is humbling to arrive at the metaphorical mirror and still see my demons in the reflection - they just use a Japanese vitamin C serum now as we sing “Reflection” from Mulan into a hairbrush. If my early twenties were about running away from them, my late twenties were about facing them. Is this the decade where I finally vanquish them? But until I do, what do I do with them? Do I have a tea party with them? Do I take them on a walk? If I do get rid of them, who will sing karaoke with me in my bathroom?

As I’ve reflected on this, I’ve begun to derive some strange comfort from perhaps accepting this feeling is inevitable, perpetual, and not unique to me. That it is in fact normal to question my life choices with every passing year. That I will not reach a divine state of perpetual and blissful happiness at an even numbered age. Maybe each year or decade will be about taking stock and seeing what’s working and what isn’t. Maybe that’s actually a healthy thing to do?

And what certainly isn’t working for me (and hasn’t for a long time now) is exhausting myself running this race against the time bomb up my butt. A race built on career goals alone. When I turned twenty-nine, I realized I had no hobbies. My whole identity was defined by being an “actor and a writer” or an “artist” on pretentious days. What did I do in my spare time? Doom scroll, if I’m honest. And so I went on a mission to figure out what I enjoyed that had nothing to do with my work. Turns out, lots of things!

I love hosting dinner parties with my husband where the only thing guests bring is a piece of gossip and I happily ruin my sleep schedule because I don’t want the evening to end. I love having brunch with my family and telling each other the plots of movies we’ve seen as if they’re stories that happened to someone we know. I love drawing and watercolour, especially having my cat as my muse. I love pottery because the focus it demands shuts off my brain and there’s something very soothing about feeling the wet clay glide against my fingers. I love tennis because it’s a sport that I’m only kind of okay at but I can play it with my dad and with my friend C and it’s a gorgeous excuse to be outside. These hobbies also challenge my perfectionism, which honestly I need. But I seem to have forgotten this lesson and it seems like for now I’m going to have to remind myself of it every day until the demons finally join me for a tennis match.