Milestone Birthday

I will turn 30 in a few short hours. After several months of wondering what I would do for my 30th, I'm feeling very content and celebratory. I had a fantastic party last night with the people who have made San Diego so special for me, and I felt very loved and happy. And I would be remiss not to mention that my girlfriends and I went through five bottles of champagne. And maybe J. Ram and I sang along to N*Sync songs and did a little ridiculous dancing at 2 in the morning. Everyone also enjoyed making fun of my fat cat Ollie, who is too slow-moving to avoid such humiliation as this:

It was a wonderful evening of talking, hugging, laughing, and just enjoying the bubbly chemistry that arises when a bunch of awesome people get together and get along. I posed with some gorgeous birthday flowers...

And wore my own party hat...

As I said earlier, for the last several months, I've been putting a lot of pressure on Turning Thirty. I felt like I needed to do something grand, like take a trip out of the country or stay at some luxurious local hotel. I'm glad I stopped feeling that way, because this weekend has been absolutely perfect. I'm so thankful for everyone in my life, and I'm also grateful that I am where I am.

I know that my 30th birthday is, for all intents and purposes, just another day. But it's also the turnover from one decade of experiences to another. I've been feeling very introspective these last few weeks, especially after a visit last month to my parents' home in Pennsylvania, where I went through years of The Memorabilia of Jill's Life. I have a hope chest that is filled with assignments and notes and journals from elementary school all the way through college. And I have another chest filled with the same from my post-college years. And last week, I skimmed through my journal from my senior year of college and the first year after, which gave me an amusing refresher on who I was nearly ten years ago.

In my very early twenties, I was fairly boy crazy. That's pretty much all I wrote about and thought about, when I wasn't angsting about what will I do with my life? When I was 20, I broke up with my first long-term boyfriend and commenced an epic crush on an unattainable fellow student, a charmingly weird guitar player my friends eventually christened my "Ungettable Get" after my overtures of affection were rejected. When I was 21, Ungettable and I became friends, I dated a bunch of not-right-for-me boys, and then I fell for someone again. Things were great, then they were not great, and at age 22 I suffered a notably painful broken heart, which I followed with a string of bad decisions. Fortunately, I lived through it all and became smarter and wiser and all around better, and at 23, I met a new boy. Over the next four years, we laughed, declared our love, adopted cats, and got married. He is what was waiting for me on the other side. It's weird to go through my journals and not find him in there, because I feel like he was the right one all along. As I said to him once, "Why would I ever look for anyone else, when everything I ever wanted is right here?"

T was with me when I applied to grad school and ultimately decided not to go. He was with me when I had a starring role in Our Town and then when I auditioned for show after show only to never get a lead role again. He was with me when I got my first 9-5 job, a temp-to-hire position in a department with the funniest, kindest coworkers I'd ever had. I left them for my first Big Girl job in an academic setting, which is where I was when T and I decided to move to San Diego together, and where I suffered serious separation anxiety when T moved six months before I did.

I think for a lot of people the 20s are about finding out who you will be. That was certainly the case for me, and it wasn't a smooth ride. Finding a job after college graduation was difficult and disheartening, and an internship that was supposed to springboard a career (that I wasn't even sure I wanted) ended early and I spent a summer in Philadelphia living alone with no money. I had some fun in Philly, sure, but mainly what I remember about living there was watching a lot of Sex and the City and eating Ben & Jerry's for dinner. Perhaps I was not the wisest 22 year old. I moved home after that and did temp work for a year, all the while wondering when my "real" life was going to start.

And the thing is, all the experiences in my early 20s created this wonderful little path that led me to where I am today. I couldn't see the path at the time, of course, and I felt like everything I was doing was boring and sooooo haaaaaard why can't life just be eeeeeeasy, but it was actually the perfect path for me to take. A year ago, I started grad school, and I've met some amazing friends who I would otherwise have missed had I gone to grad school at 24. The hours I spent at rehearsals as Portia's Servant or Random Character With Four Lines showed me a different appreciation for theatre and allowed me to let go of my striving to be the star. My first job in academia led to my first job in San Diego, and pretty much all of my experience -- theatre, academia, writing -- aligned when I applied for my current job, a position that makes my heart happy.

There is always something to strive for. In no way do I feel like I have everything figured out. But I do feel like I can leave my 20s proud of what I've done and who I've become. I think the past decade was a good starting point of learning from my mistakes, trying to be a good person, and pushing through the anxiety that comes with being human. It's a good blueprint for the next decade.