I'm 33.
The last time I upended my life, I was 22, another double number. There may be something to that.
[content warning for a brief mention of sexual assault in this essay]
This story starts in my parents’ bathroom at their old house, the one they sold that summer. I have no idea why I decided taking a call in their bathroom was a good idea, but I can see myself pacing between the sink and the tub in the mid-afternoon sun as clearly as I can see the computer screen in front of me now. On the phone was the manager of a coffee shop in downtown Washington, DC, where I’d submitted an application on a whim despite having no coffee shop experience. But I liked coffee, I liked the shop’s vibes, and apparently the way I’d answered some of the application questions had caught the manager’s eye. I confirmed when I could start and was hired on the spot.
I had what I wanted: a job in DC, even though it wasn’t the type of job I imagined I’d get when I made my post-graduation plans. I was 22, it was August, and I’d finished college that past spring. I was also about to completely upend my life, experience more financial stress than I’d ever felt before, and crash my way into the DC policy scene like an unguided battering ram. The six months before I finally busted down that door would be the most transformative of my life.
Tomorrow, I am 33. Another repeat age; another upheaval. A month from tomorrow, I will officially no longer live in this apartment. A few weeks after that, I will no longer live in this country. I will get on a plane without booking a return flight. I am giddy about this, and scared, and I may be projecting onto my past self, but I think this is exactly how I felt at 22. One of my most deeply held beliefs is that signs are everywhere if you want them to be, and so it feels worth sitting with who I was the last time I charged off into the unknown, rebuilt my life elsewhere, and chose myself.
So, who was I at 22?
Alone in a new place, living only on what she herself could earn, that woman wanted to build a lifestyle entirely on her own terms. One night after locking up the coffee shop, she walked through the bright lights of Chinatown to a Five Guys and ordered a burger. It was a weeknight after 9 pm, and it felt like she had the place to herself as she sat and savored every bite. Afterwards, she went home, satisfied, and never bought meat again.
That young, bright woman was unapologetically, unwaveringly creative. She learned how to mix tracks and tried her hand at music journalism. She trawled flea markets and back-alley vintage clothing sales for small treasures that will soon sail over the ocean for a second time. She ate pints of ice cream for dinner and watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer. She went to a gig at her favorite venue where she was drugged and sexually assaulted, and it would take her years to name that experience as something more than a night that felt a little off. She drove to the Shenandoah Valley as the leaves turned to flame and basked in the low November light. She fashioned a heart on top of every latte she poured.
Such a profound appetite for life is, in my experience, not so much sated as it is whittled away. More, more, more becomes exhausting after a while, and the satisfaction of other basic life needs can act as a placebo that tamps the hunger down. The odd bad experience weighs heavier each time. Six months into her adventure, that young woman finally got a part-time contract job at the organization where she was convinced she wanted to work and to which she’d applied at least five times by that point. (The strategy of Be Extremely Annoying Until Something Gives is a permanent feature in my oeuvre.) As that job asked for more of her energy, and when it eventually turned into a full-time gig with a proper salary, she let other things fall by the wayside. She took everything she had learned in those six months of discovery and put them in a box in the closet to gather dust. In other words, she let herself become what she thought she’d wanted, rather than what she’d learned actually made her spirit sing.
I fear I may have romanticized that period in my life a bit, perhaps to balance the financial stress that still lives in my chest and to remind myself that there were so many good times in between the nights where I frantically worked to drum up another freelance gig so I could make rent that month. There are a lot of awful men from that period I am choosing not to write about because they don’t deserve my energy and because their presence is predictable. And, I am focusing on the good because it reminds me of possibilities, of choice. It was a conscious, intentional choice to say farewell to meat and go vegetarian. Letting go of creative pursuits that filled my cup was less purposeful. These too were choices, but not ones I stared in the face and went, “All right.”
Older now, I have a better sense of what I want and a stronger instinct that I deserve it. That is, in fact, the endpoint of this entire journey that started when I was 22: circling back to the beginning with more wisdom and conviction. The proverbial box in the closet lives on the fireplace mantle now, at the heart of my home. I intend to keep it there alongside the birthday cards beginning to gather.
And so, to birthdays.
I have two guiding principles surrounding birthdays: they’re sacred, and in one form or another, they must involve cake. Multiple friends over the years have discovered that resisting my provision of birthday cake is futile. I am very happy to accommodate needs and preferences—I’ve done soy-free, gluten-free, nut-free, vegan, fair trade only, and every possible combination—and I have been occasionally willing to make the cake a tart instead. Once I poached three pears to put on top of the cake that together were larger than the cake itself. On rare occasions, I’ve only managed a cake well after someone’s actual birthday has passed. But in one form or another, if we’re in the same physical location, cake will appear.
For myself, I’ve historically preferred chocolate and all its variations, but cooking and eating with friends with different palates had expanded my tastes somewhat. Last year I made a fresh orange cake with earl grey icing. This year I think I’ll go for a plum and cornmeal affair. My mother mailed me two “3” candles from the US, which is very silly because we have birthday candles here, but she’s not wrong that I would never have bought these for myself of my own volition. Atop the cake they’ll go.
Maybe it seems unnecessary to make my own birthday cake when bakeries exist. Yet I find the process meditative and even gratifying. (I am incredibly good at making cakes.) I also appreciate excuses to grant myself a small kindness—in this case, taking the time to do something that will only benefit me—and my position on birthday cake opens that door. I have been working to notice when I practice self-denial, as noticing behaviors is a crucial first step in changing them. Yes, I will survive if I don’t fetch my sweater from the other room, but I am cold, so I can go get the damn sweater. I can even go get it now instead of waiting until I write another page because being warm is not a “reward.” (Would it surprise you to learn that I originally wrote the past few sentences entirely in the conditional tense? Would it surprise you that I had to consciously think about replacing “should” with “can”?)
Pause for sweater-fetching.
In moving back to the US, I’m granting myself the kindness of not packing up all of my belongings myself. There are few activities I despise more, so I’ll pay a little extra to have the moving company do most of this work for me. It’s a privilege to be able to pay more, and in moments like this I’m conscious that I’m not 22 anymore, both in terms of what my bank account looks like and how much acute stress my body can bear. I’m also conscious that making this financial choice will impact how I have to make future ones, so I’m also teaching myself about kindnesses that involve spending no money whatsoever. Like fetching the sweater. Like asking for help.
When I was 22, an incredibly generous couple who worked at the organization in DC where I’d interned the previous summer let me live rent-free in their basement for a month while I sorted out a more permanent apartment. This happened because I had the courage (what a strange word here!) to believe I was deserving (this one’s also strange) of someone’s help. And so I will ask for help in this next stage, too. My dearest friend Katy lives in Boston, and I can get over feeling like I might lean on her too much and trust her to decide and communicate her own boundaries. And because Boston is a big place, I can remember to ask all of the other people I know, all of the other people with whose company I’ve been gifted over the years. This is their heads-up that they’ll receive non-optional birthday cake in return.
The only birthday of mine I regret is the one I decided to turn into a deadline—my 30th. “Before I turn 30, I’ll defend my PhD,” I whispered to myself. Especially as it became apparent that no one besides me would push me to finish, I let this quiet promise be a lighthouse. Without fanfare, I suggested a series of dates to my committee that fell in the week before July 16, 2021. And so it came to pass that by noon on July 13, I’d have brought this chapter to an end.
I have no definitive memory of what I did that year on my actual birthday. I remember not wanting any sort of gathering, though I’m not sure if I ended up humoring a few friends or not. I may have made a chocolate hazelnut cake. It’s possible I went for an easy hike at Pope Farm Conservancy, a nature reserve on the outskirts of Middleton, Wisconsin, though I may be mixing up years in my head. I probably packed, as this was just a few weeks before I left to start my new job in England. But what looms from that particular birthday is its association with my dissertation. In retrospect, I wish I’d picked a different arbitrary deadline.
By contrast, I remember the previous birthday, my 29th, with startling clarity. It’s startling because 2020 was the summer of COVID and racial justice uprisings, and for me also the beginning of the academic job market, so there was plenty of chaos and calamity to keep me preoccupied. Yet these things stick: meeting in the courtyard of Anna’s apartment complex to drink beers on the grass. Meeting Ben in the park later to eat plum cake and make gin and tonics. Wandering drunkenly to the grocery store afterwards to get mac and cheese, the twilight the texture of blush-colored velvet. Trying to figure out how to turn the sword earrings Gia got me into something wearable, since I don’t have pierced ears. Loving them all the same.
And as I remember this, another moment surfaces: the night before my dissertation defense, which would’ve been July 12, 2021, I set up a meditation altar on the floor of my apartment. It was the sort of Midwestern night where the insects start up a chorus the moment the sun begins to slip out of the sky. With me at the altar was a plant Katy had sent me as a celebration for getting a job, and another from Gia I’d miraculously kept alive. Against one of the plant pots I balanced a cross-stitch Hannah had made during her “all the crafts” lockdown hobby explosion; nearby I placed a bracelet Anna had given me. I lit a stick of incense and situated it in Mike’s incense burner, one of a small collection of his belongings he’d given me before moving to Chicago the year prior. Wanting proper fire, I grabbed a pillar candle painted with the Death tarot and lit it atop a coaster Ben had brought back from Australia.
Which is to say: we carry people with us wherever we go. My moving company has estimated it will take between 5 and 12 weeks for my belongings to show up wherever I end up living in Boston. In 2021, it took 8 weeks for them to go in the other direction. The point is that it will be a while before I see many of the things that feel most like mine again. So I take the proverbial box, and the energies of people I love, and I place those among three seasons’ worth of clothing in my suitcase. (Hello, proper weather variation!) Off to new adventures we go.
Tomorrow I’ll be 33. Today I’m not. That one extra sunrise seems mundane, insignificant, and yet the language of birthdays tells us that it’s everything. In ancient Egyptian theology, each sunrise was a victory. Darkness falling meant that Apep, the snake deity of disorder, would try once again to devour Ra, god of the sun. A new day dawning meant Ra had won and that life could carry on.
One night when I was 22, a coworker invited me to a show by a local post-rock band at the Black Cat. (It turns out the awful men are making an appearance in this essay after all.) I wasn’t over the moon about this because he’d been touchy-feely before in ways that made me uncomfortable, but I was in the neighborhood already and I liked both the band and the venue. I went. Afterwards he moseyed us over to Backbar, the narrow sweaty room underneath the legendary 9:30 Club, to a DJ night. He insisted I buy him a drink; he touched my waist as we swayed. I grabbed his hands and lifted them off of me, and that broke something. The bar closed and I knew I couldn’t get in his car, even though the subway had shut down. He left me to get home on my own with far less resistance than he probably should have offered at 2 in the morning. Given that it was 2 in the morning, it also proved impossible to hail a taxi in the hustle and bustle of U Street. I’ll walk, I thought. It’ll be fine. It would have been about 3 miles home. As I hit Logan Circle, an unoccupied cab rounded the curb and I was spared wandering the city alone.
I had to open the coffee shop the next morning, and by the time the cab pulled up to my apartment, I had about three hours before I had to leave again. Sleep seemed pointless and I didn’t feel tired anyway. I watched a few Buffy episodes on Netflix before heading out again as the sun peaked over the townhouses of southeast DC. Another day dawning. Life carrying on.
Recently I read a memoir by Maia Toll, a schoolteacher-turned-herbalist who details how she learned, in the words of the memoir’s title, to “let magic in.” Having enjoyed some of her other books and how grounded her prose felt, I was curious to learn how she’d come to this particular life path. As she writes about deciding to leave her job, she mentions offhand the approach of her 30th birthday. She wasn’t that much younger than I am now! my brain realizes. Look at all that she became! It took her several more years to pursue a formal apprenticeship with an herbalist and open her own store, and it turns out that her story of rediscovering herself crystallizes into action in her mid-30s. This occurred in the early 2000s, and so by now she is a different woman. Yet from reading her most recent work, I know also that she’s still herself. She has always been herself. In her early to mid 30s, she simply decided, to bastardize her own words a bit, to let that self live.
Many people have been recommending “I left academia”-style memoirs to me, and I love reading recommendations of all kinds and I’m grateful. What I’ve needed to read most, though, is a memoir about embracing the self we are at a stage in our lives when we’re told we should continue to suppress it in favor of some kind of career and social stability. And because I love reading recommendations, I’d love more stories like this.
In the meantime, here’s what I’ll do tomorrow for my birthday. I will rise well after the sun, as we are so far north in England that sunrise in high summer happens before 5 am. I will do a quick workout in my living room. (Tuesdays are core days.) I will make tea and breakfast. Maybe I’ll treat myself to something from the bakery down the street; maybe not. I’ll read, answer emails, tidy up, make lunch. By the afternoon I’ll have settled into one of the coffee shops that I haunt in the city center, hopefully writing something more exciting than a job cover letter. I am there so frequently that the woman behind the counter will punch in my order without asking me what I want and share a little about her day as she does so. She always gives me a small discount. Later I will do my Spanish lesson, write to my mother, cook dinner from scratch and eat it with a show. (The finale of The Acolyte is on tonight.) And I will sit down for a job interview, because that’s also happening and hopefully I’ll have more news to share with you all soon.
For now, I want to end with what are, ultimately, two pieces of magic.
The first: In numerology, numbers that repeat themselves several times—222, 333—are called angel numbers and are thought to function as signs from the universe. They nudge us toward where we should look; they offer us guidance in what we should do. Seeing 222, for example, is thought to signal that the work you’re putting in will bear fruit and you should keep at it.
I don’t put much stock in numerology. Numbers have never been how I make sense of the world, and the discourse around “angels” is at once too Christian and too New Age woo-woo for my tastes. (Cast all of your “love and light” into the sea; give me the churn of the storm.) And 22 and 33 aren’t quite angel numbers anyway. Maybe I’m forcing a connection where there simply doesn’t need to be one.
But I do believe signs are everywhere if you want them to be. I marked my transition into my fullest adult self once at 22, and I mark it again at 33. Add a 3, and my new age is a gentle reminder of support. “Go forward in faith,” one article I read urged about 333. Usually invocations of “faith” are once again far too Christian to me due to my upbringing and make me subsequently recoil, but for some reason, this one doesn’t. Call it belief, call it stubbornness, but I know from experience that charging forward into a new unknown requires some degree of confidence disconnected from a cynical assessment of reality. That’s an academic way of reminding myself to trust that young, carefree woman. She was naïve and she was also so, so wise. She is still me, and though things were hard for her at 22, as they will be for me at 33 now, I am so grateful for all the lessons she kept in the proverbial box for me, for when I was ready.
If I could talk to her again, I’d write her a letter. This is the second piece: as bits of wordcraft, with the time and attention it takes to put a story down on a page, letters too are magic. Here is what I would say. I find it’s best digested with a slice of cake.
Dearest one,
Today you are 22, and your life is going to be incredible. It will look nothing like what you expect. Soon you will set off to start a new life in DC. You are scared, and you are giddy, and both are healthy things to feel.
You think you’ll pursue a career in the DC policy world. You think you’ll do a master’s degree. You think you’ll be in this city for the long haul. The first of these things will come true, and you’ll learn that this career is not what you imagined. You’ll learn it’s not for you, and you’ll have the courage to try something else. It won’t be a master’s—not in the way you thought, anyway—and it won’t be in DC. You’ll return to DC periodically, and each time you’ll thank it for carrying you as far as it did.
I don’t want to spoil the journey for you, but here are some moments I think will make your breath catch. Before you are my age, you will stand on a boulder in Norway wedged into a rock crevasse hundreds of feet above a fjord. You’ll be invited to speak as an expert in front of the German Federal Foreign Office. (This is less of an honor than it may seem, but I know how your brain works and the sort of prestige you think equates to validation.) You’ll perfect vegan chocolate soufflés. You’ll deadlift over 200 pounds. You’ll realize you have the power to make things happen for yourself and find yourself on a boat off the coast of the Faroe Islands, watching puffins nest in cliffs pulled from a fairytale. (You haven’t heard of the Faroe Islands yet, but you will.) You’ll feel in the moment like this is something external happening to you, but you’ll also be in awe of your own choices. Of your own ability to make them.
Do you remember when you reached the end of the boardwalk at Cape Flattery in Washington state, the sea salt spray splashing up from the rocks below? This memory is probably clearer to you than it is to me now. I think we were 11. When you are almost 33, you will spend some time exploring your neurodivergence (a word you don’t yet know) and do an exercise where you are asked to list moments where you felt the most yourself. This moment at the cape will still be the first moment on your lips. Your parents told you this was the westernmost point in the lower 48 states, and you will repeat this narrative for years before learning that it isn’t true: the westernmost point is Cape Alva, just south of Flattery. You will know then, as you do now, that narratives hold their own truths, and also that this means you’ll have to go back. You’ll know then, as you don’t now, that you can absolutely make that happen.
I mention these things to you because I want you to hold onto them. You have not yet felt the worst that you will feel. You may find this difficult to believe. You will come to describe your depression as a ghost come to sit in the corner chair and keep you company. In your early 30s, it will become a black, yawning pit. I am telling you this because you have the strength at that point to pull yourself out. I am telling you this to let you know that you will. Everything that you are learning right now, as you stand in front of the bay window of your first adult apartment thinking with awe, this is mine, is preparing you for climbing up and out and starting anew.
The hardest part for you will be learning that you are worth this exertion, worth this risk. It will take years for this lesson to settle in. I know you and that you will scoff at that now, at 22. I will tell you all the same: you are worth it, dearest one. If you did not believe this, you would not have found your way to that bay window. Keep trusting your choices. Keep choosing yourself.
Happy birthday, Anna! May there always be cake and things to honour and celebrate. I'm holding open space for your new chapter, with much hope and excitement for what lies ahead.
Hope the birthday, the cake, the step into your new stage of life, bring you all good things. I have loved starting my day by reading this piece. Thank you.