Issue #104: Ch-ch-ch-changes – and how to embrace them

In your own life, and in other people's.

Being in your thirties is a ride. In the past week alone, I’ve cradled three babies – most notably, meeting my friend’s newborn for the first time. In other news, one friend has gone back into education, enrolling in an advanced TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) course with a view to living in Berlin. Another, having reached the pinnacle of her corporate career and bought the most gorgeous of flats, has announced she’s pressing pause for a few months while she fulfils her dream of working in a surf house in Portugal.

It’s like watching a series of films with female leads, witnessing alternately the cosy happy endings, and/or the montage sequence where the heroine commits to The Thing she was too scared to do at the start of the movie – and seizes her life by the horns. The commonality is that we’re all in our thirties. No one is acting like, to quote Oliver Burkeman in Pandora Sykes’s latest newsletter, ‘real life is coming later’. Foundations are being laid – and they’re really, really heavy.

For the past half-decade, witnessing change in the lives of those close to me has felt scary. Threatening, even. I began to feel that way in my late twenties (I’m 33). That’s not so surprising. Aged 27, I thought I had settled down. I had the nice Jewish boyfriend, the circle of couple friends who were all getting married, getting pregnant. Our weekends were spent at weddings; weddings where people would say things like Mirtzeshem bei dir or ‘Please God by you’ – a Yiddish phrase that means, essentially, ‘You’ll be next!’

Reader, we were not next. The relationship ended. While reeling from the big break-up, I watched several close friends settle down and get engaged in quick succession. I was happy for them, apprehensive for me. Had we all made an unspoken agreement to do these things at the same time? If so, I’d unwittingly reneged on that promise.

Somewhere in the depths of my Google Docs, I have several thousand words of a novel I began drafting around that time, with the working title ‘Left Behind’. In retrospect, I should really have saved it for my therapist. Back then, I wasn’t – you might guess – feeling my most proactive. Still, I began to take action eventually. Not in the way I expected myself to (turns out, it would be a long time before I got back on the relationship train). Instead, I pursued my career; travelled; read; learnt; met a lot of people.

I stopped being a self-proclaimed victim of circumstance. I made changes in my own life, and that not only fortified me against the changes happening around me; it enabled me to celebrate them. Meanwhile, I changed, in ways that, although largely internal, feel foundational to who I am today and how I imagine the future.

As I say, your thirties are a ride. Yes, many of my friends’ lives have gone in drastically-different directions from mine – second babies, six-figure salary careers, homes with staircases. I used to ask myself: ‘How will I keep up?’. Now that it’s comically-unfeasible to do so, the pressure is off.

Life has a strange way of making sense, looked at backwards. Now, I know I wasn’t ready to make the same decisions as my friends. I know, in some cases, I never will be.

Nonnnnnnn, je ne regrette rien!

And maybe that’s just a comforting story I’m telling myself. An empowering narrative. Either way, it’s working.

As it turns out, the options for how to live are so much abundant than I once imagined. In my late twenties, it looked like everyone had ‘settled down’, like a game of Musical Chairs where the music had abruptly stopped. Looking back, that was far from the full picture. I was blinkered; hyper-focused on the friends following the trajectory I’d perceived to have ‘lost’.

I’ve witnessed unexpected plot twists in the years since. Everyone’s lives are moving on, but not all in the same direction. While it’s easy to fall into the narrative of ‘everyone’s smashing it in their career/meeting The One/having kids’, it’s rarely the case. Life was, is, and will continue to be complex, for me and everyone around me. It’s highly unlikely that everyone in your life is doing exactly the same thing, at the same time – and if they are, it’s probably time to widen your circle.

Talking of which, I’ve met a lot of people over the past two years. In stark contrast with the cliche of the shrinking friendship circle of one’s thirties, I’ve broadened mine: through travel, further education and getting to know my local community. These connections have felt deeper than in my teens and twenties. I’ve met people open-heartedly, from a place of greater confidence, and in many cases soberly. Now, when I consider how my life could change, I have a much more diverse range of examples to point to. That’s powerful; you can’t be what you can’t see.

My perspective has broadened. I notice, and admire, different qualities in people. Like being a badass, for instance. In Mexico last month, a 60-something Canadian woman in my Spanish class was telling us about her recent world travels. I asked the teacher for the Spanish word for badass: ‘chingon/chingona’ (m/f). It’s a slang term, generally positive, for someone independent, intelligent and competent, who lives on their own terms. A few days later, during an internal flight, I saw a woman on the plane wearing this hat, emblazoned with the phrase ‘Soy chingona’.

Let’s hear it for the chingonas among us: the people whose lives veer away from the perceived norm, such as the American van-lifer I befriended on my trip, but also those who are badass-ing in smaller, everyday ways. Making a career change; taking a course; moving home; entering or exiting a relationship; having a baby in a conventional or unconventional way. I’m ready to celebrate any time someone makes a decision, whatever that decision is. You absolute badass.

Change doesn’t feel as scary anymore. In fact, it feels like it could be contagious. If this person is doing X, it means I could do that too! Or at very least, it gives me a vicarious insight to help me decide either way.

Studying fiction has also enhanced my appetite for change. It’s hard to, week-in, week-out, ask questions like ‘What makes a worthy plot point?’ and ‘What makes my protagonist heroic?’ without wanting to turn the lens on your life and the lives of those around you. You start to applaud what the kids call ‘Main Character energy’, while you have reduced patience for stagnancy (mostly your own).

Change is inevitable. If you’re lucky, you get to choose some of those changes, rather than have them thrust upon you. To hold fast to what you want, and to have faith in the direction you’ve chosen. That used to terrify me – and it still does. But now, it excites me, too.

Spiritually I’m still here, third-wheeling the couple snogging behind me (Puerto Escondido, Mexico).

Since returning from Mexico at the beginning of the month, I’ve found February has a lot to redeem it. For me, some everyday highlights include:

• Flowers: rainbow tulips and daffodils… bring on spring!

• Fleeces (I’m obsessed with my sold-out Uniqlo x Marimekko one which is still knocking about on eBay)

• Jacket potatoes: Beans, coleslaw, extra-mature cheddar and/or a mega tuna salad mix like this. The air-fryer comes into its own here, too

• Home-cooking in general. I had missed this while I was away! Last night my friend cooked us Singaporean national dish Hainanese chicken, a recipe so laborious and delicious we have dubbed it ‘love chicken’

• Cosy sofa time (solo, shared)

• ‘Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy’: Exceeded expectations. And my expectations were higher than The Shard.

• Movie awards season! I watched the BAFTAs at my cousin’s flat recently, and we loved watching Mikey Madison secure the Best Actress award for ‘Anora’ – the underdog choice, but a deserved one. I also loved this write-up in The Times: ‘Anora: how a $6m film about a sex worker became an Oscar frontrunner’.

Until next week!

Francesca x