Last week, I turned 30 and went through some very on-brand anxiety leading up to the big day.
I’m so very lucky to have people in my life (hi mama, hey husband) who ask me The Birthday Questions during birthday season: what do you want for your birthday and what do you want to do for your birthday? but by no fault of their own and by every fault of my unchecked narratives and self-published beliefs, these questions mostly presented me with my suppressed-but-still-expressed deep-seated issues around wanting that I didn’t even know I had.
Like I said, very on-brand.
As seems fitting for leaving behind the decade that felt like trying to push a rock up a mountain and look cute doing it (because obviously everyone is watching and paying so much attention to you), I enter this decade with one final internal narrative implosion. Leaving my 20s feels like leaving behind a heavy sack of beautiful bricks that paved the way for so much goodness and joy but have since fulfilled their duties. The last brick I add to the sack that remains in yesteryear is this brick of a story about “wanting.”
When confronted with The Birthday Questions, no less accosting for me than what I imagine an interrogation room spotlight feels like, I was also confronted with my apparent abhorrence to wanting in general.
Here’s what I discovered in the wake of turning 30 that I did not know I believed but apparently did:
Wanting— more specifically, acting on one’s wanting— is selfish. It’s unbecoming. Icky. Needy. Bratty. Self-indulgent. And to be self-indulgent is to potentially ignore— or, worse, fail to meet— the needs of others. And the needs of others are so, so important! Meeting others’ needs = caring. Putting others’ needs before one’s own = super kindness. Super empathy. Super good.
If you’re following my cute-but-flawed logic, here’s where we are: Acting on one’s wants is (potentially) unkind.
Ok so maybe not even cute. Just flawed.
But with this logic as background, you can see why The Birthday Questions were making me want to hurl. Not only was I forced to stare my wants directly in the eyes, but then I had to express them! It felt like the “what do you want for dinner” conversation that’s really just a perpetual merry-go-round that I ride as long as it takes for the other person to express their true desire because, ew, I’m not expressing mine.
Except this time, there was no other person. There was no merry-go-round. There was only me and people who loved me waiting with baited breath to willingly, eagerly carry out my wishes for this special day.
On top of grappling with this very flawed and very unhelpful narrative about wanting, I was also having wedding-dress-shopping emotions. Which is to say, not only was I disgusted by the act of wanting, I was disappointed in my wants.
I was turning 30, this age we hype up and set on a pedestal, and all I could think that I wanted was a cookie cake, a margarita, and a t-shirt with a German Shepherd on it that I bookmarked from an instagram ad.
Cool.
And so for my final self-conducted therapy session of my 20s, I asked myself where and when I got the idea—that then crystallized into a belief— that “wanting” was icky and somehow in conflict with being a good human, and I closed my eyes and let myself want.
I thought of all the things I wanted.
And I didn’t judge them or try to think about how to make them happen, how much they costed, whether or not anyone else would want to do those things, if they were “weird” or inconvenient for anyone else.
Nope.
I just… wanted.
And that became the very best birthday gift that I gave myself: the gift of freely wanting.
With no time limit or rules, I let myself want for my 30th birthday. I let myself want, and I acted on those wants.
Coffee from my favorite local place.
Cookie dough bites in the middle of the day.
A pressure-free nap.
Taking my time in TJ Maxx.
A glass of champagne while I got ready for dinner.
Whatever caught my belly’s desire from the menu.
Turns out, wanting doesn’t hurt anyone else. In fact, it maybe even illuminates others because it illuminates you. And as it also turns out, I deny myself my “wants” so very much that granting myself permission to want freely was like opening up a dam.
You should try it.
Birthday or not.
P.S. In scrolling the archives for the above-linked piece, I came across this one that’s all about What I Wanted Most In My Twenties. *sigh* It was such a fun decade. It really was. But also: really, really, tough and really, really, full of learning. Woof. Much love and respect to my twenties, but gratefully and eagerly anticipating the dirty thirties!