30s is not the new 20s and thank god for that

I remember I was around 19, when post a bout of Anaemia, I noticed how almost overnight, a bunch of my hair had turned grey. I remember standing in front of the mirror and thinking, “That’s it. It’s downhill from here”.

That was 12 years ago. On my 30th birthday a friend called and in a forced-enthusiastic sort of way tried cheering me up, “30s is the new 20s!”. It was sweet of him, so I smiled and said thank you, while every decalcifying bone in my body dreaded the idea of feeling like my 20s again.

20s was unsure. 20s was about desperately wanting to fit in and equally desperately wanting to be different. If Erikson were examining me, he’d say I was wading through the conflict between Ego Identity and Role confusion. A decade of experiments (some gone horribly wrong) and people who have appeared in the form of books, videos, friends, teachers, rivals, and even cats, have taught me a few things that I would have liked to tell the 19 year old me mourning the loss of a little blackness in her mane. Here are the five most significant ones-

Accepting is change

Back in my 20s, when I met older women who told me how they felt much more comfortable in their skins as they got older, my Olay-conditioned mind could not quite believe them. I now get it. They had found their feet in the world — feet that finally felt like they could be their own after years of staring at many other feet, even trying some on (with massive shoe bites!). It is a beautiful feeling, that I now understand why one wouldn’t trade off for the very Fountain of Youth. Such acceptance of yourself is not meek resignation. Carl Rogers, the father of person-centered therapy, notes the curious paradox of initiating change through acceptance:

We cannot change, we cannot move away from what we are, until we thoroughly accept what we are. Then change seems to come about almost unnoticed.

But don’t make me change!

After having found yourself with such difficulty, the idea of changing can be overwhelming. You want to bite back every suggestion of change with a This-is-me-Like-it-or-F-off. The problem with such an over-fixated sense of your self is that it closes all possibilities of growth. Your mistakes repeat the same patterns and your relationships get stuck at the same points. One of the most liberating ideas that I have come across in the last decade is that of neuroplasticity. That we are not really hard-wired in our brains but can change our patterns. But as psychologist Erich Fromm explains in ‘The Fear of Freedom’, with such freedom also comes great anxiety- If I can change, then I am responsible for who I turn out to be and I don’t want to make those calls! How do I decide which part of me to conserve and which to change? I haven’t found a definitive answer to this one, but for now the best heuristic seems to be what Mandela said:

May your choices reflect your hopes and not your fears

So who’s the happiest of them all?

By our 30s, we’ve all experienced some form of betrayal or heart breaks. Some of us become bitter and come to believe that the world is a nasty place. And yet, some of the happiest people around me seem to be those who still are able to have some faith in others. This faith is not a naive denial of people’s ability to harm. It is the hope that the human capacity for fellowship coexists alongside our dark sides, and is equally available to invoke as the other.

Here’s my access code

This, personally, has been the hardest thing for me to do — trusting others with fixing my problems. When you’re growing up as a teenager trying hard to be different, you end up really believing that no-one else has the ability to understand the complex wonder that you are. But generally speaking, people are smarter than the credit we give them, and if given a fair chance, can surprise you with a great deal of sensitivity and insight. So in my 31st year I finally gave it a shot and shared with some of my close companions what I call my ‘access code’ — the way I think and feel, and fail, in the hope that in times of mental blocks, they will be able to use this information. The experiment was hugely successful. Their voices helped me hear my own more clearly.

Beyond the high wall of intellectualism

Clever intellectual arguments can win you the last word but not necessarily many hearts. If anything, all you may have achieved is making people feel stupid, which is rarely the recipe for bringing about any positive change. In my 20s I was attracted to such arguments. Perhaps, like alcohol, it fuelled my ego and that was the addiction of it. I now recognise how much rarer and much more transformative it is to be in the presence of people who can listen with empathy, share themselves with faith and laugh heartily.

Looking forward to another ten years :)