Beyond the Boundaries of a Milestone

You are sitting at your parents’ house waiting for your life to happen. The last few years have not gone as planned, and you’re starting to feel like you are stuck in a black hole you cannot get out of. You’ve picked yourself up so many times before, but this time, you are wondering how you are going to make it out.

You’re in your thirties, and you’re watching everyone you went to college with fulfill their dreams and wondering where you went wrong. You’re working in the same suburb you worked in at the age of 18, while your former classmates and friends travel the country and the world, celebrating their successes. Every time you scroll through social media, someone else has gotten married or engaged, while you’re still trying to learn how to love yourself.

Even though you feel like you have fallen behind in life, you have to remember everything you’ve fought against to get to where you are right now. Every time you needed to be saved, you saved yourself. You got yourself out of some of the darkest times in your life, and this time, I know you can do it, too.

When we’re younger, I think it is easy to paint these spectacular images of what our futures will look like, without thinking of anything unexpected and difficult we might encounter along the way. We give ourselves milestones measured in ages as if we stop having a chance at being successful or beautiful or loved or even just happy once we reach a specific age.

One of the most important things you will ever learn is that nothing happens once we hit those big milestones on our calendars. They loom over us like a storm rolling in, letting us know that soon, we won’t be able to avoid the inevitable. But just like a storm will eventually roll through and then move on, so will all of these milestones.

We are taught to fear hitting them as if our lives will stop if we haven’t achieved our perfect dream lives by the time we reach them. There is no reason for any of us to believe that; there is no difference between the last day of being 29 and the first day of being 30. I promise you that one day you will turn 30, and then the next day will happen, and your life will simply carry on. You won’t cease to be relevant, successful, happy, or attractive all because you reached a manufactured milestone society has come up with to make you feel bad about yourself.

You don’t have to give up on yourself because our society makes you feel like you should. There is no reason to stop believing that you will find your dream job, love, or whatever it is that success means to you because you didn’t do so by a certain age.

So, yes, maybe you are not where you hoped you would be at this point in your life. But that doesn’t mean you will never get to that point or fulfill whatever dreams you have come up with beyond that. Please don’t let a calendar tell you that your life is over. There is so much more to be found beyond the boundaries of a milestone.

Age is simply a marker for time, not for your level of success.