30: What A Year

This past October I turned 31 and I thought that it would be cool to do a blog reflecting on the thirtieth rotation around the sun. In my thirtieth year, I've had a lot of ups and downs, but more importantly a lot of great adventures. I used to be afraid of getting older. I didn't handle turning 20 very well, but as I eased into my 20's I grew more comfortable with the idea that age is just a number. I think the anxiety stemmed from my depression, lack of guidance and the idea that I needed to conform to some sort of timeline. Going throw most of my teens as a self-harmer, struggling with making myself sick and worrying that morally I deserved all that I got, I didn't really have a plan for after finishing school. I always sort of thought that my life would just end. That I'd complete the deed and everything that I'd gone through would just become a distant memory to me. I went through my twenties on rocky ground. I was jumping from place to place trying to figure out who I was. Sometimes I look back and see parts of me scattered all over the world and wonder why that place and that time. I'll never really have an answer to that and that's okay. It's just interesting to look back and see how things unfolded. I got a regular job, started to travel less and fell into somewhat of a normal routine. I dom't regret the trips I've took in favour of other oppertunities. I did things my own way and I took away so many things away from these experiences. The one thing that always sticks out in the memories is that I'm on my own. I've invited people along on trips, don't get me wrong, but for the most part I was on my own. It just reinforced the thought that I only had myself when it came down to things. I hold onto certain people and places on my skin, marked forever as a physical memory I can hold onto. Just as I was starting to plan new trips for 2020, COVID-19 hit and the world stopped. I think this is a time when people as a whole became more narcassitic, more self-obsesed (and maybe not even deliberatly) and deluded about life. Sometimes I think that modern medicine and telly dramas have given the masses an unrealistic expectations; expectations of life, the limitations of medicine and deluding them that they can push the clock back time and time again, staving off death for as long as they can. I didn't feel trapped by the pandemic. I worked throughout the entire thing. But I took lockdown time to create. Work on new things. I took time for myself. It was time that I didn't even know that I needed. I started to let go of relationships, unrealistic goals and just redefined the things that I wanted to do. It took a while to perfect a stress management for me, and it's still something that I still have to work on, but it started to help me balance all that was whirling through my head. Sometimes it felt like everything was racing through me at the speed of light like I was nothing more than a processor for all this information. While I never got COVID myself, it was an eye opening experience for myself. It challenged my thoughts about society, personal choice, informed medical consent and informed medical care. I'm now able to take a more active role in my health care, which I hope will help me with some of the anxieties that I've faced. I wasn't afraid to turn 30 like I was afraid to turn 20. I didn't feel that I'd wasted all this time as much as I felt that I'd wasted my teens. I had different twinges of regret, different moments of sadness and more growing moments. This past summer, I returned to England for a cross-country experience. I've always loved returning to London, but taking in Stonehenge, The White Cliffs of Dover and everything else, left me with a longing and a deeper connection to something bigger than myself than before. I don't know what to call the force. God. Creating force? Whatever you want to call it, it made me more thankful for the sights I got to see. It made me question the corruption of organised religion, the hidden truths of salvation and the greed of man. It changed the way I saw people as a whole. It changed the way I exaimed certain events of my life.