There’s something about thirty, man. The second the clock struck midnight and it was officially November 18th, 2016, I turned thirty.

And I let out a HUGE sigh of relief. Huge.

I found my 20’s equally beautiful and trying. I was DEEP in the thick of giving an eff about what people thought about me and found myself feeling “out to sea” at times, both personally and professionally. I fell in whoa-nelly love for the first time in my 20’s. I got my first real-life-omg-I-now have-a-salary job in my 20’s. I got approved for a mortgage in my 20’s. It was some real-deal, I-am-totally-an-adult-now type of stuff. And given my general disposition towards introspection, I thought I was as self-actualized as they come and I had my stuff figured out.

I was wrong. So wrong.

So, when my 30th birthday came along, I thought,

THIS is going to be my decade. My 20’s were for trying things out and failing at them as much, if not more, than I succeeded at them. But 30? That’s when you figure. it. out. You learn the lessons in your 30’s.

Turns out, simply turning a year older doesn’t, in itself, cause a shift that drastic.

In fact, it takes a lot of work.

It has been in my 30’s (all two years of them!) that I’ve learned that I’ll never really have it figured out. Sure, we might get married and have the kids, get the dream job and/or design our dream house if we hadn’t already gotten around to it, and while these are all momentous achievements on their own, reaching these milestones, in and of themselves, doesn’t mean we’re done and we’ve made it and we can all just pack up and go home. I’ve found that it has taken getting older and having a pretty solid collection of life experiences to really learn that and let it sink into every fiber of my being. I equate it to making enough money or losing enough weight – too much ain’t enough and all that. And life is MESSY. It’s so beautiful and full of magic, but it’s so messy and imperfect, too.

That being said, being intentional about learning and growing does cause shifts that are pretty profound. And my goal here is to talk about it all, the magic and the messy.

All of that is to say, friends, I don’t have it figured out. Not by a long shot. But I can say, with a content heart, that I’m more sure of myself than I’ve ever been and in my years of searching, I have learned and continue to learn a lot along the way.

And that’s what I hope to share here with you. So stay awhile. Let’s lift each other up and grow together. What’d ya say?