On my 25th birthday my dad told me "you're now closer to 30 than you are to 20." While said in jest, those words have hung heavy around my head for the past five years.

During this later half of my twenties, I've felt like my thirtieth birthday has been approaching at an ever-accelerating pace. And much like an object approaching the event horizon of a black hole, try as I might to glimpse something from the other side of what the future may hold, there is no light that can make its way back to me.

My twenties as a whole have passed before me much faster than I could have imagined when coming into them. So much has happened in a span of time that feels woefully compressed. I ask myself "will my thirties fly by even faster?"

And yet, as I sit here on my 30th birthday I feel oddly at peace.

This morning I woke up, took the dog for a walk, and then brewed myself a pot of jasmine tea. As I write this, I am sitting in my sunroom, enjoying my tea, and being still.

A few weeks from now will mark one year of being in therapy.

The experience of learning about myself as I've opened up to my therapist has been as rewarding as it has been brutally taxing. You don't reach twenty-nine years split between two opposing hemispheres without accruing a whole mountain of baggage. Baggage which, up until this point, I'd buried deep down and never come to grips with.

Over the course of that year, I've learned so much more about myself. I wish I had started sooner, but I find it rather fitting that it lines up so well with this final stretch before turning 30.

I know I have a long ways to go, but I am thankful for having taken the time and energy to work on myself and deal with some of these things—at least in part—before entering this next decade of my life.

It's hard to know what I want to say at what feels like a seminal moment.

I just know I want to write something down that I can look back on in ten years to remind myself of how I was feeling in this moment.

Recently I've had this image from Tim Urban fixed in my mind's eye:

I've spent a lot of time over these last few years obsessing over the black lines of the past.

What could I have done differently?

What would I have done differently?

What should I have done differently?

I think it important that I remind myself that the past is the past and there's no use wringing my hands over it. The important thing is that today, in this moment, I consider what I will do that I can look back on fondly tomorrow.

So if there is one thing that I want to say to my now 30-year-old self, it is this:

You still have a lot of time to make yourself be what you want.

— S. E. Hinton