Thirty-five and feeling alive
It’s my birthday and therefore a good opportunity to be self-indulgent. “Even more self-indulgent than your average personal email newsletter?” I hear you cry. “Yes!” I reply, while sitting in bed in my birthday pyjamas, eating birthday cereal and surrounded by a huge pile of birthday presents.
Every year on my daughter’s birthday, I write her a little letter to seal up until she’s 18, detailing all the funny, cute things she’s been up to that year (this has been easy up until the age of three, I imagine finding sweet things to say about a surly 15-year-old will be a bit harder).
I thought maybe I could do the same for myself in this newsletter, but now I’m 35 I can’t really remember what I’ve done in the past year. In fact, when people ask how my weekend was on a Monday I’m normally like “I’m sorry, I can’t actually remember what I did” because stuff falls out of my brain almost instantly (it’s the same with films and book plots).
I can remember that yesterday I googled ‘things to achieve by the time you are 35’ and made myself laugh because all the articles included points like ‘start a business’ (but I’m too tired!) and ‘write a book’ – as if it is a feasible idea for every single human being to churn out a novel in their early thirties.
I also had a little ponder about where I was 10 years ago, because I remember 25 being a bit of a landmark birthday too. At the time I was living in a flatshare in Clapham with two of my BFFs from school - a top floor flat with mice, a fire alarm that beeped every 30 seconds and a trip switch that we could only reach by dangling over the bannister with a badminton racket (I’m not sure if I’ve already written about this place? Predictably, I’ve forgotten). I was single, but felt certain that at my grand old age I had seen the world and was ready to settle down, a belief that seems utterly hilarious to me now. Three months after my 25th birthday I met my future husband on the sticky carpets of Inferno’s, and we moved in together when I was 26 (partly to escape the beep).
At 25, I worked for a weekly (!) magazine for hairdressers, writing about different types of extensions and interviewing the wig makers on Shrek the Musical etc. Although it was very far from being be most boring business magazine out there, I was desperate to break into the glamorous world of consumer journalism, but there were hardly any jobs and the few that did come up always seemed to go to girls who had spent four years working for free while living in their parents’ townhouse in Chelsea (I am not bitter, obviously). Six months after turning 25, I got made redundant (turns out weekly hair magazines are not that sustainable?!) and took the plunge to apply for a digital internship at Cosmopolitan, even though the pay was abysmal and I felt way too old for it. Luckily I got the gig, then the internship developed into a digital writer role. Despite earning a pittance I could just about survive off my redundancy pay-off, and having Cosmo on my CV finally cracked open the door to consumer magazines. In hindsight, getting booted from my job turned out to be a blessing in disguise.
Actually, my main thought looking back on the past 10 years is how overwhelmingly lucky I’ve been. I’m lucky that I had that random meeting with my lovely husband, a man who puts up with me despite my many foibles, such as being so untidy that “you can literally see a trail of where you’ve been in the house”. Though it once seemed impossible, I did finally get one of those magical magazine jobs that is fun and interesting, and means I get lots of money-can’t-buy experiences and to meet fascinating people. And of course there’s my daughter, who is very cute and cuddly, so much so that I can forgive her every time she shouts “shall I wash your wobbly bottom mummy?” at top volume in the leisure centre showers.
Someone said to me recently, “the problems people around you have in their thirties feel a lot more like real problems that in your twenties”, and for me that’s certainly been true. I’m also aware that anyone much older than me who reads that line will be grinning through gritted teeth and thinking: just you wait. So with that in mind, I’m going to use this birthday not to cry about my ever-decreasing collagen levels, but to feel rather cheery and grateful for how far I’ve come. Let’s just hope I get half as lucky in the decade to come.