Last week I turned 35…. THIRTY-FIVE!!!!!! Depending on where you are in the great age spectrum of life, you’re either thinking, “Oh damn, I’m sorry.  You’re old!” Or “Psssh shut up, 35 is nothing!”  Isn’t it funny how as women, (hell, maybe just as this generation, regardless of gender?)  we’re never really allowed to be comfortable with our age?  It’s like it’s ingrained in us to want to be younger or to look forward to better years. But fuck that. I’m thirty-five and I’m happy right where I’m at—even if it is only for the first time in my life.  My husband wrote the sweetest little happy birthday tribute on his social media, starting with “Happy 33^rd birthday babe!” When I called to thank him he beamed, “You like how I said 33^rd?  Now everyone thinks you’re two years younger!”  I chuckled, finding it sweet that he thought that was so important to me and realizing that for some reason it wasn’t.  It did make me remember though, how five years ago I turned thirty and it felt like my life was over.  I woke up and cried on my thirtieth birthday.  A lot.

Thirty made me evaluate where I was in my life, and as far as I was concerned, it wasn’t pretty.  I was a failure.  I was nowhere near where I had expected to be at that point of my life. I had let opportunities pass me by.  I had given in too easily and settled in so many ways instead of pursuing things that I wanted.  Instead of sticking it out and getting my degree at the college of my dreams, I gave in when presented with adversity and dropped my scholarship at UCLA to go to UNLV – a school I had refused to apply to as even a backup originally.  Feeling defeated with my family’s situation at home I had lost faith in the mental health field and quit pursuing my pre-med psychology degree and settled into hospitality instead.  I had gotten married simply because everyone else around was getting married, and therefore had found myself divorced within six months.  At thirty I woke up feeling like an old, unhappy, childless divorcee in a career I had never even wanted anything to do with, and in yet another unhealthy relationship simply because it was easier to be miserable with someone than to do it alone.  I hadn’t felt challenged in a long time because every time I had been challenged I’d just quit and given in.  In my mind, failure was the only appropriate word for my life thus far.

My unhealthy relationship led me to therapy, where we had agreed to couples counseling.  Long story short, that didn’t work (the couples’ therapy or the relationship) and I was so desperate for outside perspective that I begged the therapist to continue seeing me on my own.  Let me emphasize the word desperate because I was pretty staunchly anti-therapy, if you remember from my previous post: Hippie Dippie Things that Make You Hate Therapy and Why You Should Reconsider.  I began seeing that my unhealthy relationships were my own doing, my own picking, and the same applied with where I was in life.  So without even realizing at the time I was doing it, I began to challenge myself to do everything that was against my instincts in an effort to change things around.

As is typical, not every habit was easy to break.  I stumbled right into a new relationship against the urging of my therapist.   Looking back now I think I was crazy and really really could have used some time alone. But in the end, it worked out well and I ended up marrying him! (Thank God for poorly thought out decisions sometimes, huh?) He was an exciting, out-of-the box thinker who I was drawn to for being so unapologetically fun loving.  So fun loving that he was unemployed, and not even stressed about it.  And when he had been working, he’d been a nightclub and casino host – both jobs that in my days in Hotel Management, even I had enough sense to steer very clear of dating from!  They were typically overly-confident, womanizing, party boys in my experience and from the whispers from my coworkers.  But I had spent all these years striving to appear professional and grown up, and he presented the first opportunity in a long time to just allow myself to have fun and not take myself so seriously.  When he questioned why I stayed in a job I hated and encouraged me to quit and do something I loved, I found it to be an exhilarating challenge, and I did it without a second thought.  I had spent nearly the last decade settling, and I was up for the change of pace and the opportunity to turn some of my decisions around.

I wanted to go back to school and decided quickly that I wanted to be a therapist.  It would give me the opportunity to right my path for having steered away from the field of mental health when I was younger, but in a way that I didn’t feel like I was selling out.  But a Master’s degree and licensure process would take years!  How was I going to make money in the meantime?  I sure as hell was not going to be yelled at every day for 14 hours by ungrateful miserable tourists, I knew that much.  I thought back to the feelings that I’d wasted my youth.   Maybe I could right that path too.  

Despite my original hate for the city when I moved to Vegas, I secretly wanted in on the scene —the glitz and glamour, the gambling and drinking, the bottle service, the go-go dancers, and especially the excitement of a level of exclusivity that at the time only Vegas nightclubs had a monopoly on.  In my mind, the nightclubs were the end-all-be-all of top notch living in your twenties.  They literally housed all of the “cool kids” of Vegas, with their faces plastered on all of the local magazines talking about the insane amounts of money they were making and their goals and hobbies outside of the club—which were normally unattainable for us normal folk, like buying expensive cars, and taking expensive trips to Thailand and Ibiza. But when I’d sheepishly auditioned upon my arrival to town, with no experience except being a beer maid at a British pub, I didn’t get the position. Shocker.

But now I didn’t have anything to lose. I’d already been rejected, what was the worst that could happen? When I truly reflected, I realized that one simple rejection had led me to ten years of choosing instead to judge the club kids and find reasons to dislike them—they’re vapid, cocky, dishonest and probably cheaters in relationships, have drug problems, don’t have any direction in life, etc.  And then I was sad enough to even think I was better than them, because I was in a miserable middle management position with zero authority and even less money to show for it?!  Being unhappy with yourself makes it really easy to skew your thinking into some really absurd bullshit.  But here I was dating one of those unsavory guys I’d hated (for no reason) for so long, and he didn’t seem all that different from me or anyone I knew.  He was just a helluva lot more carefree!

I set aside my thoughts that thirty was old, that the nightclub scene was out of my reach, and that the occupation was degrading in any way (I did not have to be a clean cut put together professional to be taken seriously; thanks therapy).  I figured I’d be a circle in a square peg, but I didn’t give a fuck.  I was going to get a nightclub job and like it even if it was in some dive in Downtown Vegas.  I was going to persevere and overcome feeling different or like a failure and I was going to find a way to actually have fun while doing it.  The way I saw it, it was my goal and my responsibility to do it for myself rather than allow myself to feel like a failure even further down along the line for never really trying.

After several auditions, (and probably some help from the boyfriend if we’re honest—everything in life is who you know. Don’t ever forget that) I got in!  And as it turns out, I wasn’t as different from these kids as I’d allowed myself to think all these years.  First of all, 30 was not old to many of these veterans and I was far from the oldest employee there.  And a lot of them had side businesses and other future plans they were working towards too.  They weren’t bitchy, they weren’t fake, and if we’re honest, they were all far more aligned with their true selves than I had been for the last ten years.  They were just chicks having fun behind the bar making a lot of money, and they were more open to allowing me into their lives than I’d anticipated.  Why had I told myself differently in the first place?? I couldn’t even remember.   

I embraced the scene for a few years, working nights, banking money, having more fun than I’d had since I was 21, and going to school during the day.  I felt more like myself than I had in years, allowing myself to dress up and actually feel pretty (dare I say, even hot at times?! OMG, I was so risqué!) , and even doing a couple of modeling shoots to document this bloom. They were awkward and uncomfortable, but I didn’t want to forget this feeling of newfound self-confidence that I was slowly starting to build.  I eventually left the club, feeling satisfied that I’d caught up on the “youth” I felt I had squandered. I went into a new challenge in real estate, wanting to try my hand at something entrepreneurial, since my visions for my Therapy Practice aren’t exactly traditional.  And now I’m focused solely on finishing my student-intern portion of my degree, where I see clients all week and already feel the satisfaction of helping others to better themselves.

Without having taken the time to challenge myself and find myself I don’t think I could have ever even become an effective therapist, or wife, or happy person at all.  As I mentioned, I married that crazy out-of-the-box thinker and now we’re waiting on our second beautiful child to arrive just a month after I finish this degree that seemed lifetimes away when I started.  I have even bigger plans and goals for the future to look forward to and I know that I’ll never allow myself to settle for less ever again, no matter how hard things get.

I want to say that everything has fallen into place, because that’s what people say.  But it’s not true.  It took a lot of work, discomfort, challenging myself, and learning more in the last five years than I did in the previous decade.  So I’m happy to be 35.  I might not feel young all the time (pregnancy doesn’t always allow for that), but I don’t feel old! And yes, I’m so looking forward to my future too.  But 35 feels damn good, knowing the work that I’ve put in to get here.  I don’t want to forget that this was the year that I was happy for self-acceptance and being exactly where all my work had planned for me to be.

XOXO – Lindsey