Here’s what I wish I could tell my 30-year-old self, says writer Victoria Owens, who is realising that she wasted an awful lot of time doing one thing…
They say youth is wasted on the young and as I get older, I am starting to agree.
Having just turned 40, I often find myself thinking back to my younger self and how much time and energy I wasted on things that were out of my control.
There’s so much I wish I could tell the 30-year-old me who was so worried about life and how it wasn’t going the way I’d planned.
There is so much stigma attached to the age of 30 – a milestone when many women predominantly feel they should be ahead in their career, married or at least in a steady relationship, with children either on the way or on the horizon.
I had none of that.
At 30, I was newly single, had no prospects and was working in a junior role on a job I liked, but didn’t love, while all my friends were getting promoted, engaged and pregnant.
But jump to 10 years later and I’ve never been happier.
I’m engaged to my partner with two beautiful children and the boss of my own business, which I created after a string of constant career pivots.
But that’s not the point of this story – the point is that a lot of my youth was wasted worrying I’d end up single and childless instead of living in the moment, enjoying my freedom and taking advantage of a life that for the most part didn’t have any obligations.
I wish I could tell that girl not to worry, that life will work itself out, that what I was striving for would eventually come to me in my own time and in its own unique way.
But what I mostly want to tell her is that worrying about what could be is such a waste of time that could have been better spent on being kind to my younger self.
They say we are our own worst critic, and in my case it couldn’t have been more true.
I was trying to experience life at hyper-speed, hoping it would get me where I wanted to be faster.
I travelled the world, I invested in property, I dated constantly, all because there was no time to waste, or so I thought.
In my head, once I turned 30, my biological clock was ticking and that clock was only going to get faster and faster with every day that passed.
This was then confirmed by a GP who I approached about my “options” while trying to get my fertility levels checked, in case an urgent backup was needed.
But I was told if I really wanted a baby, getting a blood test to check my levels wasn’t going to help me and instead I should “get on the apps” to date.
Telling a single girl in her 30s to use app-dating to find a baby daddy is like telling a toddler to eat their vegetables to get big and strong – neither of you know if it will actually work but you can’t afford to rule it out either.
And a decade on, it still feels like some of the cruellest advice I’ve ever been given by a professional.
If a GP was telling me I needed to hop to it, then I thought I was really out of time.
I went on date after date, had my heart broken over and over until at last I’d had enough and I was ready to take myself out of the game of love and towards something that was a little more controlled.
So I told myself if I was still single at 35 I would look into IVF with a sperm donor so I could take the pressure off dating and just have fun.
And I did – and just a few months into that carefree fun, I ran into my now-fiance, whose future timeline was the same as mine.
With him, everything just clicked into place and for the first time in my life, a relationship felt easy and effortless.
Which brings me back to present-day-me, who is so happy that my worrisome 30-year-old-self found her happy ending.
As I get more and more sentimental with every year that passes, I want to carry this feeling that I have now into my future – that everything will happen the way it’s supposed to if I just let life happen instead of worrying about what could be.
Hopefully by the time I’m 50 I’ll be pleased I figured this all out early enough to enjoy the next 10 years with a little less worry.
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