My twenty-eighth birthday was this month. And somehow where twenty-seven felt natural, twenty-eight feels so much older. twenty-eight is almost thirty, twenty-eight is my twenties coming to a close. It’s crazy what one year will do to your perception of age. I don’t know if I’ll have that deep emotional response to turning thirty, only time will tell, but as for twenty-eight, I feel a little behind, I’m not sure why, I’ve reached all the points on my self imposed timeline, but somehow I feel like I should be doing more.

I’ve talked about how our culture extends adolescence into our twenties, and how it’s a relatively new phenomenon, and I’ve talked about how I’ve tried to avoid it, but somehow I’m reaching my late twenties wondering if I should be more at this age. I don’t know why, I’m a wife, mother, and homeowner with a full time job. I’ve reached my milestones. I’m very happy with my life. I’ve made good choices.

This lingering feeling isn’t abnormal, I’ve heard it from my friends who are also nearing thirty. How we expect people to go from their free and wild twenties to their mature and developed thirties almost overnight I’ll never know. It’s a deep flaw in the way we view certain ages as mature and others as not.

It’s an even bigger thing for women, who tend to reach thirty and have a biological panic if they want kids but don’t have a partner.

Is it all self imposed nonsense? I mean biologically speaking our brain stops developing in our early twenties, that should be the end of adolescence, and also women do face more health challenges having children as they age. But all the milestones are set by us, whether personally or by society.

I think it’s important to acknowledge that most of us know many adults in their thirties, forties, and fifties, who have messy lives that are certainly not the in order grown up life we all imagine. A lot of time it’s not even their fault, life has thrown curve balls at them and some of them were brutal. Those kinds of curve balls can come at any age and accepting that you may not ever have you perfectly imagined adult life is important. It eases that sting that comes with ageing.

That being said, I don’t think we should be winging it either. I think we should be trying to grow and set goals. I don’t think we should party our twenties away and save the growth for our thirties, we never know when we’ll need that stability.

Aging is a tricky subject matter, but it’s one that needs to be talked about more, especially when it come to the twenties and thirties.