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Home » Just Blogging

Turning 30

Written by on March 21, 2013 – 8:00 am38 Comments | 1,090 Read this
Turning 30

Turn­ing 30

Today, on March 21st, I am turn­ing 30.

It doesn’t faze me much. I could pre­tend I’m freak­ing out over the big “3−0” because my twen­ties are over but really, I don’t care because I am look­ing for­ward to many more years of adven­tures, life expe­ri­ences, ups and downs and surprises.

I remem­ber turn­ing twenty—Feng and I were back­pack­ing and we had just arrived in Syd­ney that day. I thought it was pretty cool to cel­e­brate my twen­ti­eth birth­day Down Under, on the road. If I had been told that ten years later, I’d be a mar­ried Cana­dian cit­i­zen with a baby, I would have laughed.

And yet… it hap­pened. Somehow.

I don’t think I changed much in the past ten years. Hon­estly, phys­i­cally, I didn’t really… okay, I do have a cou­ple of white hair, cour­tesy of Baby Mark. That’s about it. I have the same hair­style, same (lack of) fash­ion sense, same pierc­ings (I didn’t even took off my navel pierc­ing when I was preg­nant!), same Doc Martens shoes—gee, I’m real­iz­ing I’m actu­ally pretty con­ser­v­a­tive I guess!

I did gain life expe­ri­ence through immi­grat­ing to Canada, work­ing in dif­fer­ent envi­ron­ments, liv­ing with Feng, hav­ing a kid and trav­el­ing. I cher­ish these experiences—each one of them taught me a lot.

I have never set major life goals for myself, such as “must be mar­ried by the time I am 25” or “must have a career before I turn 30”. Frankly, I am not even sure how to define suc­cess in life—one person’s def­i­n­i­tion of an achieve­ment is vastly dif­fer­ent from another. I think I am pretty happy with how my life turned out, espe­cially con­sid­er­ing I didn’t plan a sin­gle thing.

What mat­ters to me is expe­ri­enc­ing the breadth of life expe­ri­ences, good and bad. I don’t want a bor­ing shel­tered life. I want to laugh, I want to cry, I want to feel hap­pi­ness, empa­thy and anger.

So far so good. I’m embrac­ing this new decade… and I’ll pick up some expen­sive anti-aging cream on the way back home, just in case.

Turning 30

Turn­ing 30

Turning 30

Turn­ing 30

Related arti­cles:

  1. A Pinch of Chi­nese, a Pinch of French—Our Bira­cial Baby
  2. 1 + 1… + 1 = Fam­ily Portraits
  3. My Non-Scary Non-Gory Labour and Birth Story – Part III
  4. Me, a Mommy? Seriously?
  5. Palais de Justice
  6. Tulum, Playa y Pueblo

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