Birthdays are a funny thing. They sometimes can be a great excuse to get together with friends or do something you really want to do, other times you can feel pressured into celebrating something that doesn’t feel like much of a celebration. It can also be easy, especially at a “milestone” birthday, to feel wrapped up in what you haven’t done or compare yourself to other people your age, or younger than you.
Today is my thirtieth birthday. The imagined expectations are even higher when you are leaving a decade behind and thirty is the kind of age many people hold up as a mythical time when you will have it all “figured out.” That adds up to a lot of pressure but I don’t believe that anyone really has it all figured out – at thirty, or otherwise! – and besides, that idea makes it seem as though change doesn’t happen after a certain age. Surely we keep evolving, learning, growing, and changing our minds throughout our whole lives? I certainly hope so.
With that in mind, I decided to look back as I leave my twenties and reflect on some of my highlights, both big and small, from that decade (in no real order):
- Earning a degree
- Studying even harder and earning a Master’s degree
- Being granted a distinction for my Master’s dissertation
- Living independently for all of my twenties (and two years prior)
- Moving abroad at 22 and subsequently living abroad for four years
- Travelling solo to Nepal and Malaysia
- Finding out what I am passionate about
- Having my photography published online and in print
- Hiking for ten days straight in the Himalayas
- Cutting most of my hair off and having the sense to grow it back again
- Swimming with a shark and a giant sea turtle
- Spending birthdays in Hong Kong, Thailand, South Korea, Malaysia, and more
- Being showered by an elephant
- Travelling overland from Hong Kong to Prague
- Learning to read two new alphabets
- Hitchhiking from one side of Europe to the other
- …And being part of a committee who raised £55,000 for charity through the hitchhiking event
- Becoming mommy to a beautiful cat
- Making amazing friends from all over the world
- Appreciating spending time with my mum, including taking some amazing trips to Hong Kong, Turkey and Belgium
- Appreciating spending time with my sister, including moving to the same city as her and taking some amazing trips to Singapore, Lithuania and Poland
- Being vegetarian for the whole of my twenties
- Visiting the ghost town of Pripyat
- Turning every house I live in into a home
- Meeting someone I deserve and who deserves me
- …And saying goodbye to people who don’t
- Discovering my love of the Brontë sisters
- Walking on a glacier
- Seeing the Northern Lights
- Finally starting a blog, after years of thinking about starting one
What would you put on your reverse bucket list?
This post was inspired by Kathryn’s beautiful post here and hers in turn was inspired by this equally lovely post from Holly.
