I’ll be turning 30 in less than a week, and it’s starting to hit me how many goals I’ve still yet to accomplish. My aunt reminded me of a big one when she came to visit me a few months ago.
I apparently declared to her when I was younger that I would be a millionaire by the time I turned 30. She said I didn’t know how I was going to do it but that I knew it was going to happen. When she brought this to my attention recently, I asked her if I still had to hold myself to that statement since I’d completely forgotten about it. She informed me it still counted. Crap.
To make up for lost time, I’ve been furiously* purchasing lottery tickets this past week. It’s pretty much my only hope for reaching my goal at this point. Currently, at T-minus four days, I’m $24 in the hole.
Another thing I still haven’t done is finish writing my first essay book. I’ve started it many times over the years, but it remains incomplete. I forget about it. I lose interest in the stories I picked. I change the focus and overall theme. Something always stops me.
I think it’s what motivated me to start this blog, which at two posts and counting is the most publicly committed I’ve ever been to getting my words down on paper, so to speak. All I can say is it’s a start.
In the past, I always thought the best age was 33. You’re old enough that people take you seriously but are young enough that it’s still considered a tragedy if you die.
Objectively, that perfect age still makes sense to me, but approaching it is making me more uneasy than I expected. I’ve never been one to freak out at my birthday. I generally don’t freak out about my age and have been more irritated in the past with being too young as opposed to feeling old. Turning 30 feels different, though, and I think it has to do with realizing there are so many things I still haven’t done. Stereotypical things like traveling abroad. Christ, I don’t even have a passport.
But then I realized there are other things I never expected I would have already done by 30—or at all—and that’s kind of cool. Things like getting married, owning my own home, or being able to say I work professionally as a writer.
Thinking about those things make me pretty happy, so maybe I should focus more on that than everything I still haven’t gotten around to. I can always change the deadline to 31, right?
* Furiously is a relative term. Considering I never purchase lottery tickets, almost anything more than one counts as that for me.
The Procrastinating Writer 