Discovery in Decades

Nobody tells you that you are building a person in your 20s. You think you are just living. Taking a job, losing a job, getting on a plane to a country where you barely speak the language, walking across a stage in a cap and gown three separate times. Falling in love with ideas that won't last. Letting go of dreams you thought were permanent.

You think these are just things that happened to you. It takes a decade, sometimes two, to look back and realize you were laying track. Every version of yourself you tried on, the student, the fired employee, the woman who packed a suitcase and moved to Mexico to learn a language nobody in her family spoke, was teaching you something about starting over that you would need later, long before you knew why.

I turned twenty the year I graduated undergrad. I was twenty-two when I finished graduate school and twenty-six when I graduated from law school. Somewhere in between all of that, I got fired from a job for the first time in my life, and it would be the only time until six months ago. I studied abroad in Spain and Mexico twice, disoriented in the best way, rebuilding confidence in a language that wasn't my own. Looking back now, if I had to describe my twenties in one word, it would be educational.

Not educational because of the degrees or in the classroom sense, though there was plenty of that too. Educational because of the person I was becoming. Educational in the sense that I was unknowingly collecting data and patterns. How I respond to failure. How I rebuild when I am starting from zero. How I handle being the new person, the unqualified person, the person who does not yet know the rules of the room. Can I build a life somewhere I've never been? What happens when the plan doesn't work? At the time, every experience felt isolated. Today, I can see they were connected. Every new beginning made the next one a little less terrifying. Every setback quietly became evidence that I could survive another one.

Your 30s cash those patterns in, whether you are ready or not. If my twenties were educational, my thirties have been surrender. Not the defeated kind. The kind where you finally stop pretending you are driving the car.

I almost chose the word unexpected. Or humbling because this decade has been about discovering how wrong I was about the certainty I carried in my twenties. I had plans, very detailed plans that couldn’t be altered. I knew exactly what I wanted my life to look like. Except...God smiled politely and did something entirely different with life.

I said I did not like kids. I am a mother at 34. I said I would never be an entrepreneur, and if I am honest, that was fear wearing the costume of certainty. I did not want the risk, the uncertainty, the inconsistent income. I’ve always thought of myself as someone who didn’t move for public opinion, but when it came to entrepreneurship, it seemed more acceptable and understandable to me to not even try  than to risk failing publicly.  My perspective has certainly changed.  I would much rather fail, than to fail by not trying at all.  The public has nothing to do with it anymore because the try and the failure are something I now know would live within me and me alone.

And now I am in it, building businesses I once convinced myself I never wanted. Not because I finally worked up the courage on my own timeline, but because life made the decision look a lot more sensible than staying still. I've started to understand something I couldn't see before. The rat race does not build anything that outlives you. Ownership does. Something you can leave behind. Something that buys you time and location instead of asking for more of both. Sometimes the biggest risk isn't betting on yourself. It's never giving yourself permission to try.

My thirties have also introduced me to something my twenties never could:

The illusion of control. Some things cannot be planned. Some opportunities cannot be forced. Some doors won't open until you're willing to loosen your grip on the blueprint you created years ago. For someone who loves strategy, organization, and contingency plans, that's been one of the hardest lessons of my life. But it's also become one of the most freeing. The more I trust that God doesn't need my permission to write a better story than the one I drafted for myself.

Surprisingly... That's no longer scary. Life today looks almost nothing like I imagined it would. The things I was sure I did not want, I now want. Some of them I was pushed into more than I chose, and I am doing them joyfully anyway, with a strength I did not know I had and a faith that is finally bigger than my need to control the outcome. Somewhere in my 30s I started understanding that God being in control is not something to fear. It is the only thing steady enough to hold what I could not hold myself.

My life looks nothing like the plan I made in my 20s. It’s messier, linear, far less predictable, but somehow richer, and dare I say maybe even more fun. I love it for me anyway. I have more uncertainty than I planned for. Yet somehow I also have more peace, more courage, more faith, more belief that I can figure things out when I get there.  I don’t know if that’s maturity, or simply experience finally catching up with ambition. 

I do know that even though I’m no longer a child, it still takes a village for one person to thank.  They didn’t solve all my problems, no one can, but my parents sure made a way for me to live in peace and in a great position and to that I’ll always have to say thanks.  Thanks to the pastor that didn’t know me, but prayed for me anyway, the neighbor who offered her help and also a prayer, the lady I hadn’t spoken to in years, but prayed for my family and offered her network, my siblings who randomly thought to ask if I needed anything financially and otherwise, and many others known and unknown.

I cannot write you the truth of your 40s or 50s from experience, because I have not lived them yet. The good news is that I don't have to learn every lesson firsthand. Some lessons are borrowed. I have watched the women ahead of me, and if there is a thread running through what they say, it is this. Your 40s tend to be the decade where the performing stops or in their words, “they just don’t care anymore.” You stop explaining yourself to people who were never going to understand you anyway. Your 50s, from what I am told, become less about proving and more about presence, about deciding who gets your time because you finally understand how finite it is. They talk more about freedom than titles, more about health than hustle, about relationships than résumés.

Because perspective grows. Every decade seems to ask a different question.

Your twenties ask: Who are you becoming?

Your thirties ask: What are you willing to surrender?

Your forties seem to ask: What actually deserves your energy?

our fifties begin asking: What will remain because you were here?

Maybe that is the real thread through every decade. Your 20s teach you who you are by accident. Your 30s ask you to surrender the plan you made with incomplete information. And somewhere past that, if the women ahead of us are right, you finally get to just be her, without the audition. I'm sure the women reading this who are living those decades could add lessons I haven't earned yet. And that's exactly the point. Wisdom isn't only something we accumulate. Sometimes it's something we're willing to receive from people who walked the road before us.

I don't think any decade is supposed to be mastered while you're living it. You understand your twenties in your thirties, appreciate your thirties in your forties, and I imagine your fifties give meaning to almost everything that came before. Maybe that's why we're always tempted to rush ahead. We assume clarity lives in the next season. But maybe clarity only comes from looking backward long enough to notice the thread that connected it all.

So wherever you are today, don't dismiss the season you're in simply because it doesn't look like the one you planned. One day you'll look back and realize you weren't just living through a decade. You were becoming someone that decade needed you to be.

I am not there yet. But I am starting to understand why they say it is worth the wait.