Feature photo: A still from ‘are you even real?’ a dance project the author produced about longing for connection in this isolating year, January 2021.

My 30th birthday was last April. This means I have spent my 30th year almost completely inside, in my apartment, in my small corner of the world.

This age feels both meaningless and like an important benchmark. I know there are so many more stages to life past this age. But I can’t help but reflect on 30 as a dividing line: what I was able to do in my life before 30, and what options that leaves me to do after it. But if life is divided into before and after, what is meant to happen during? And what happened during this experience of 30, when it felt like life was suspended?

I am usually not a big party person, but last year I decided to plan something big to mark 30. Coincidentally, there were two live events I wanted to attend – a concert and a cabaret show – the night of my birthday and the night before. I decided to round it out by planning a casual apartment get-together on the third night. The symbolism of three felt very fitting.

Of course, that all changed in March 2020 when everything shut down. I told myself it didn’t matter, I didn’t like big celebrations anyway, and I had never done a big birthday party before. Why did it feel so disappointing to have this one cancelled?  

It wasn’t about the party, though. It was about a nagging feeling that 30 was supposed to be marked somehow, made distinct and special, in ways I struggled to connect with during a pandemic.

Expectations for what a woman is ‘supposed’ to do by certain ages have been changing over the past decades, and I have the feminist movement to thank for bringing me more options and opportunities. Nevertheless, 30 still continues to hold a special place in my consciousness. My mother had her first child, my older sister, when she was 30. Now that I’m nearing the end of the 30th year, the chance has officially passed for me to meet that same metric. Did I want to have kids by 30? Do I want to have kids at all? I don’t know, but it doesn’t matter. What matters is the door is now closed to do this thing by 30.

What other doors have now closed? I’m a dancer, and it seems with each year I set goals for myself to work on my flexibility and strength. I hope I still can, but I know that as I get older it’ll become more and more unrealistic to think I can gain flexibility or increase strength. How many more years do I have left of pushing my physical limits before my bone density starts to decrease, before I’m perimenopausal, before my body chemistry changes before my eyes? My hair is already graying, and while I think it looks actually pretty cool, I fear that I could lose viability in the eyes of those in the dance industry who prize youth and vitality.

At the same time, I recognize that, in some ways, I have “achieved” societal expectations for 30. I am not married (and do not plan to be) but I have a long-term, soon-to-be-common-law partner. I am also the Executive Director at a small non-profit organization and, while I did not have a career plan built around being somewhere specific by 30, there is some comfort in establishing myself in my professional field by this age. 

But does it matter what we do before and by the age of 30? Both technological advancements and generational shifts in attitudes and expectations mean that age is less and less important as a marker of, well, anything. There are more options and possible permutations of life combinations than ever before.

I know this, but I still can’t get over this feeling that 30 is a specific place. It’s the start of the trail head. It’s Everest base camp. You can’t climb the peak if you don’t at least wake up, pack your backpack, fill your water bottle, get to the starting point. It’s the set up for whatever comes next.

As much as I can make life make sense when I divide it into before and after 30, what still confounds me is what one is supposed to do during. It feels like there is a liminal space between the before and the after. My 30th year. What does one do here?

Am I meant to take a break and enjoy whatever hard work I have done in my twenties to get to the point I’m at now? Am I meant to be already determining a next set of goals to achieve by 40, 50, 60?

The during is the tension, I think, between the before and the after. I am still young enough to comprehend and (at least somewhat) stay on top of new trends and technologies. I am still young enough to be asked for ID at the liquor store, to be excused for not knowing things, to be called “young.” I’m also old enough to remember a time before social media, to feel pressure around retirement plans and RRSPs, and to have unexplained knee pain. The thought of low-rise jeans being trendy again makes me instantly weary. I re-watch shows from my youth and relate more to the parents than the teenage main characters I once idolized.

And adding to this complication, of course, is that my experience of being 30 felt like it existed in a vacuum. My world was shut down for the entirety of this supposedly meaningful year. I can’t speak for others’ experiences, but for me it took at least six months before I felt like I could adapt and handle life in this new world. I spent those first months in a fog, feeling disoriented every morning and only minimally less confused every evening. By the fall I felt more adjusted, but the second wave and colder weather meant the lockdown felt personal as we again retreated inside and shut down our unrealistic hopes and dreams.  

Now that it’s spring again, things feel more hopeful. But it also feels like coming out of a hibernation, as if for the past year we’ve just been sleeping and waiting it out. I feel this deeply in my bones, but I also resent it vehemently. I don’t want to think of this past year as lost or wasted. I want it to have meant something.

I think that’s the struggle of this pandemic year. It feels like time has been suspended, on pause, like nothing has changed and we’re just waiting for our lives to resume. But, simultaneously, it feels like time is slipping through our fingers too quickly for us to catch up to. Peoples’ lives are continuing and we can’t participate in them in the same ways we once could. Babies have been born that will be toddlers before their grandparents can meet them. Loved ones have passed away without last goodbyes. Weddings, funerals, graduations have happened through a screen or not at all.

Milestones happen once, at specific times or places. That’s what makes them special. We can’t go back to catch up on ones we missed. And I think that’s the tough part about spending thirty in a pandemic, too. No matter what I hoped or wished my thirtieth year would feel like, what I thought I’d do, I couldn’t do any of it. It didn’t matter what I wanted it to be, because it had to be a quiet year inside. It had to be suspended between life before and life after. It had to be a physical embodiment of the liminal thirty feeling.

When I think about it – and I have been doing a lot of thinking lately – I know this is all more fluid and changeable than the rigid categories my brain likes to file things into. When I cancelled my 30th birthday plans last year, I asked my friends to donate to one of three organizations of my choice rather than come to one of my three parties. (Three parties…what was I even thinking?) I still got my symbolism of three, and I also still got to mark the occasion with my partner and virtual celebrations with family and friends. It still felt meaningful.

And when I struggle with feeling like this past year has been wasted, I remind myself of all the ways I still grew and changed. I started going to therapy and learning more about myself, my habits, and why I am the way I am. I choreographed new dance works, wrote new articles, finished some projects and started other ones. I started running again, and after a year can happily report I have gotten no speedier but I do enjoy it more.

The thing is that our identities are always changing, even when it doesn’t feel like it. I can look in the mirror now and see the same face I did a year ago, but I know it’s not the same person in there. Partly, it’s individual: we’re always different than we were as we learn new things, form new relationships, take on new challenges, react to new situations. And partly, it’s societal: as we age, others will always place us in different categories based on how they see us, and we can’t control what assumptions others might make.  

So maybe 30 is still a threshold, a place between before and after, but maybe it’s smaller than I thought. Maybe it’s just a point at which, if you want, you can stop and take notice of what’s around you before you continue on. Maybe it’s not the starting point of the trail, but just a little flag stuck into the side of the path. You might even miss it if there’s mud or snow, or if you’re too busy talking and laughing with a friend.  

Maybe what’s more important is to lean into each new identity as you get to it. To see it, to learn from it, to do your best to embrace it. If we’re lucky enough, we’ll live long enough to experience them all.