When the five year plan starts looking smudgy, living your own “rough draft” becomes necessary.

There are people who say they don’t care about what other people think. And then, there are honest people. If you’re a woman about to hit the big ‘three-oh’ who hasn’t gotten married, had children, found Jesus, or hit a career milestone that, at the very least, made you famous in your zip code – the world (society, culture, media, J.D. Vance) will have you believing you’re left with few options to prove your purpose, besides (universe forbid) becoming a “childless cat lady”. And, if you do care just a little bit about feeling off course from your peers, it becomes especially difficult to find said purpose when you’re pretty sure none of those things are actually something you 100 percent want yet anyway. Except for maybe the cat.

And so, it got me thinking: if you haven’t done all the usual things by your thirties, do you have to do something bigger and better? 

A little over three years ago, when those very words hit me, I knew I had no more excuses. If I wanted to find the ‘bigger, better thing’ I needed a big change. I thought, “Alright, what the f*ck am I doing? I work remotely. I can do that from literally anywhere (within a seven-hour time difference, preferably). Enough of this clacking away at a keyboard, doing Zooms from my one-bedroom apartment kitchen counter in Denver. What if I did it… from other apartment kitchen counters in other countries?” 

Maybe the ‘bigger, better thing’ is out there somewhere, and I just haven’t seen enough of the world to know what the hell it could be. But here’s the thing that movies like Eat Pray Love, Under the Tuscan Sun, and The Holiday have taught me: if you’re lucky enough to have some savings, a slip of your risk-aversion, and a helping of middle-class white privilege, you can prove to everyone that your existence as a single woman in her thirties is more than just your job, and more than being a walking Bechdel test. All you have to do is run off and travel the world. People will applaud your courage, even though, let’s be honest, you didn’t need courage. What you needed was a global pandemic that made it impossible for a while, a remote job that makes it very possible now, and the fact that you kept telling yourself there was no time until you suddenly realized…”Oh sh*t, I’m turning 30.”

I knew I had to do it. 

At first, I couldn’t bring myself to say it out loud. It felt like one of those grand resolutions people make in the safety of a journal. And as a Scorpio, I personally cannot relate to that activity because my innermost thoughts and feelings should never see oxygen let alone ink. Anyway, one of those declarations in which the moment you speak it aloud to someone, opinions around it somehow start to feel less like yours and more like theirs, and before you know it, you sleep on it, and your enthusiasm has leaked out like a crappy air mattress from beneath you. 

But the reality of it all is inescapable. Eventually, you’ve got to start booking flights, making decisions, and being honest with yourself about what you truly want.

And so, in the end, that’s exactly what I did. I started saying it out loud. I started saving money, gave notice that I wouldn’t renew my lease, moved back home to lovely Lino Lakes, sold my Jeep Liberty. But, most importantly, I started.

Now, at the slightly riper age of 33, it’s a question that still lingers for me. I lived my version of Eat Pray Love, with little to no praying and a lot more remote working. I haven’t discovered the “bigger, better thing” I’m supposed to do yet. But one thing I know for sure is that I can do something with everything I learned along the way.

I can share it.