I think, when I am at the end of my life – a long time in the future, I hope – if I am ever asked what the most significant decade for me was, I am certain that I will say it was my thirties.
Here are a couple of pictures of me on the first day of my thirties, 3rd January 2015.
I was very much still carrying the chaos of my twenties with me. I was in poor health, partly genetic but mostly self-inflicted. I was trying to get a novel published, but I wouldn’t show it to a soul except for agents. I was about to move from Southampton to Newcastle the following month, and I was stressed, because I find moving incredibly stressful. At this point, I had never even been to Newcastle.
Life is so different a decade on.
I have such a changed understanding of my health and my body now. A few months after moving to Newcastle, I started running, and over the years it’s become the most important thing I do every day. Two years later, I decided to take control of my weight and lost five stone via Slimming World. Then another two years after that, I faced up to my alcohol addiction and quit drinking. All of this enabled me to be taken more seriously by doctors, and I finally had diagnoses for my ankylosing spondylitis and my asthma – issues that had affected me for my whole adult life. Daily living is so, so much better now that I am healthy, and I know that the lifestyle I’ve built will enable me to be a healthy and active older adult in the future.
When I turned thirty, I was upset that I hadn’t yet managed to become a published novelist. On the eve of my forties, I am still not a published novelist, and I’m fine with that. I understand now that these things happen when they’re meant to, and the progress I’ve made in my writing over the past ten years means more to me. That progress has, for the large part, come about via being brave enough to share my writing with others – through programming and publishing text adventure games and through reading my poems at poetry nights – and the helpful feedback and affirmation I’ve received through these processes. I still have dreams of being a novelist, and many works in progress, but it will happen in its own time.
When Geth and I moved to Newcastle, I saw it as just another temporary location, as I still very much wanted to return to Edinburgh eventually. I hadn’t really settled well in Southampton, and I didn’t imagine myself ever seeing anywhere other than Edinburgh as ‘home’. But now, Newcastle is absolutely my home, and I see myself living here forever. I had never even visited the city until we did a quick househunting trip three weeks before we moved here, but I have fallen in love with the place. It is where I feel most comfortable now.
Here are a couple of pictures of me from today, the final day of my thirties.
I am so excited for my forties. I am so much more confident and sure of myself and happy in my own skin, and I know I will achieve a lot. But it was what I did in my thirties that created the foundation for this confidence. I changed my own life, and I am so proud of myself for doing that.