Looking back in time

Thirty on purpose, volume 1

This is 30!

• 💎 Swallow charm necklace. Boden sent me a £10 off voucher for my birthday, and I was idly browsing around their website when I saw this pretty ‘charm necklace’ with a swallow on it. Just the right level of simplicity and adornment for my personal taste, and as I grew up reading Arthur Ransome’s Swallows & Amazons series the idea of swallows always makes me think of freedom, and trying not to be a duffer. 

• 🍫 Kitkat Dark Chocolate. Delicious. Simple. Perfection. *chef’s kiss*. 

• 📕 Pineapple Street by Jenny Jackson. This is just out in paperback, and I’ll bet you £10 that you see it next to every pool and on every beach this summer. Rich people behaving badly, and with characters that you really root for; I absolutely loved it. (Amazon - ad, affiliate link)

When I was 24 or 25 I got a copy of Meg Jay’s The Defining Decade, which I found incredibly influential. In it, she describes the twenties as ‘the critical period of adulthood’; ‘the years when it will be easiest to start the lives we want.’ 

“The twenties are an up-in-the-air and turbulent time, but if we can figure out how to navigate, even a little bit at a time, we can get further, faster, than at any other stage in life.”

It might seem odd as a way to kick off a series of posts about starting my 30s, but I want to take you on a journey back to 2014, when I turned 20. 

’Rather Be’ by Clean Bandit was at the top of the charts and One Direction were up against Bastille for Best British group at the Brit awards. Frozen was newly out and absolutely massive! I was living in a chaotic student house, where I’d had to point out to one of my housemates that I’d rather she didn’t host her birthday party in our living room on my birthday (the kicker - my bedroom was the converted front room, common in Victorian terraces now used as shared houses, and there was only a single pane of glass and flimsy curtain between me and the actual lounge). I was just pulling out of what I still think of as the Worst Time in terms of my mental health, with the help of Leila Sales’s This Song Will Save Your Life and my university’s counselling service. I was halfway through my undergrad degree and deeply worried about what my future held. 

If you took a snapshot of me at 30, things might - at first glance - look pretty similar. I’m living in a rented flat, 12 miles away from that grubby shared house, going for runs alongside the same river, and taking anxiety meds that work to keep my baseline high enough that I can do all the things that make life worth living. 

But. 

I’ve done a hell of a lot in the intervening years. I lived for a year in Germany, and then 7 years in Scotland. I bought a flat (thanks to some very generous family help and a cheap mortgage), quarantined alone there during a pandemic, and then sold it. I have built a professional career in a field that didn’t really exist in 2014, and I have a completed novel on my Google Drive! I’ve defined myself. 

I still talk all the time to my best friends from that time, and as well as them I’ve found more lovely chums along the way. They are my chosen family, my village, even though they’re spread around the country (and the world). While I haven’t got a ‘significant other’ (and my version of the ‘Big Ex’ that I think most single people have by 30 is that I haven’t got one), but I know who I am, what I want, and what I don’t want - and have gained plenty of anecdotes to tell you all and to sprinkle through my novel writing. 

I think 20-year-old me would be pretty impressed with where I am in life right now. 

And unlike at 20, when I was overwhelmed by the future, and the knowledge that picking any one path would mean closing doors to others, I’m now happy with the path I’m on. When I look left and right at people on similar paths to mine, it’s less about panicked comparisons and more about learning what’s possible and which actions might unlock which future opportunities. I’ve learnt that I don’t always have to do the ‘optimal’ thing - going back to renting might seem like a financially terrible decision (and I might well wish, in 20 years’ time, that I hadn’t), but I found being a solo homeowner to be incredibly stressful, and I love that when the hot water goes down, all I have to do now is wait for someone else to organise a fix for it. 

Which leaves me more time and energy to do the things I want - like writing to you lovely people, reading fun books, and working on my novels… 

Speak soon,

Lily

PS: The Amazon affiliate link above only works to give me commission if you click through from the Substack app or website, rather than directly from your email program. Other ways to support this newsletter include liking, commenting, and sharing it with a friend who you think might like it. Thanks in advance!

---

If you liked this, you might also want to read this reflective piece about the man who ruined the memories associated with an old picture of me:

Give Me Back My Girlhood, It Was Mine First

Or you might enjoy the indulgent nostalgia trip I went on last summer, just before leaving Edinburgh:

Pre-nostalgia