So I turned 30…

Something unimaginable happened to me that I’m still trying to wrap my head around. I turned 30 years old.

This milestone never felt real to me, even as a kid. A part of my mind never believed that I’d last this long so I’ve never pictured what life could be like after 30. I wasn’t suicidal (briefly - yes, but not when this mindset started) so I can’t confidently say one reason over another why I always felt like life ended here, but as the clock continued, and I awoke the next day, I couldn’t help but accept that yes, life does go on.

Which, oddly, brings me hope.

I can confidently say my 20s were the worst years of my life. It honestly felt like a second teenaged era. Usually I hear about people hating their teenaged years and then finding themselves in their 20s. For me it was the opposite. Briefly, I found myself in my teenaged years, and then my 20s broke me (without all the chemical soup that comes with puberty), and I’ve been trying to find myself again ever since.

There have been so many segments in my life during my 20s that felt like cursed domino pieces falling one after another for years on end. I’m not going to get into specifics, but ultimately it was demoralizing.

That’s not to say I hadn’t had any positives in the last decade. I think I made some pretty good friends for a time, and I was able to experience many unique situations that has influenced who i am today for the better. But the bad definitely outweighed the good, no matter how hard I tried.

Now that I’m 30 I feel like I can leave all that behind and take a step forward with my life. I’ve seen my peers take that step ages ago. I think it’s time I followed.

Heal Myself

I’ve recently noticed how low my self-esteem is. So many miscommunications I’ve had over the years resulted from my mindset of not being good enough to be heard, or knowledgeable enough to voice an opinion. It’s affected my decisions to try new things and take life’s reins into my hands.

I also believe I have far more anxiety than I initially thought. It became clear this year how often I’m influenced by fear. Fear from leaving my house, fear of losing a friend, I’m afraid to write most days, I’ve been more fearful from being inside a car over the years, interacting with people I don’t know chills me at times so I avoid social gatherings.

As a kid I was never the social one, but it wasn’t this bad.

One day, when I was working at the movie theater, I had hurt my back. How? I don’t know. All I did know was I was in pain. Everybody at work commented on it, asking if I were alright. Managers told me to sit in a chair because I was walking different, which if you know anything about our company that’s a big deal. I kept brushing it off telling them I wasn’t in that much pain. Clearly I was wrong, because once my back healed I finally realized how much pain I was in — it was a lot — now that I could compare how I moved/felt.

I believe my anxiety has been acting like that. While I’d believed it’s been manageable, I’m more than likely holding too much of it in to realize how expansive it’s gotten, and the only reason I’m making the connection now is from seeing all that its affecting with my fear.

I desperately want therapy. I’ve let my problems fester for too long, I know that, but I’ve tried so many times to no avail. It’s so hard to find someone I’m comfortable with, and when I do open up, more often than not I’m greeted with a look of pity that makes me feel worse than when I came in. The only solution therapists have given me are drugs. I’ve been against that option, but at this point it may be the only way.

I really want to walk out my door and tackle life as confidently as I see others.

Change My Body

Signing up to a gym was one of my best decisions.

My weight has fluctuated from 170 to 286 in the last 10 years. One summer I’d be 220 and by winter I would have it down to 200, but by next summer I’d be 230. No matter how hard I tried I could never keep my weight off, and it seemed that my starting point always came back farther than the last. It’s exhausting to fight your body, especially when you hate your body.

Fed up with it all, I joined a gym and hired a personal trainer. I couldn’t do it on my own anymore and I’m so glad I reached out. I’ve avoided the gym for years because of many reasons: I get anxious with crowds, I don’t like people watching me work out, and social media is flooded with people taking videos of others at gyms. I don’t want to end up on the internet as a laughing stock.

The gym I decided on always looked slow when it came to crowds, whenever I passed by at the mall, and since joining I make sure to come during their slow periods. Everyone there is respectful and it feels more like a small community than a place to work out. All the employees are super nice. Ridiculously nice. I talked to a guy maybe twice and he always makes sure to greet me if he sees me in the gym. Not just a simple ‘hi, how are ya,’ but a genuine question where he remembers my name. It blew my mind. I honestly never thought I’d feel this safe at a gym.

And that makes me excited for what’s to come.

My ultimate goal is to lose weight, but once that happens my next goal is to mold my body the way I’ve always seen it. I’ve hated my body since day one. One of my earliest memories is feeling like an alien inhabiting a human shell, but I couldn’t sync with my shell. I was an outsider in my own body. Everyone saw me as the big strong guy, others would probably add ‘scary’ or ‘ugly.’ I rarely take pictures because I can’t look at them. I never look good and quite frankly I’m always disgusted with myself. One of my biggest surprises in my 20s was coming to find out how moldable the human body is. It’s incredible how much you can change it to fit your image, and I want to do that with mine. I want to be able to take pictures and look the way I feel. The best way I can describe how I’ve felt with my body is being a small bunny in an ugly ogre’s skin, and I think this is a way to change that.

I’m still working on my attendance, but when I am at the gym it feels safe and fun. I like to learn about the workouts my trainer assigns me and how they affect my body. When I work out at a gym, time seems to fly by, whereas, when I worked out around my house, time was slow enough it felt as if it stopped, making any progress feel excruciating. It’s astonishing how night and day my outlook towards working on my body has become since joining the gym.

Find Meaningful Friends

I was lucky in middle and high school. I found someone I could call a friend, and from knowing him I made friends through him. Sadly, after high school that didn’t last and when they were scattered like leaves in the wind from my life I realized that I didn’t have much experience in making friends on my own. Which, starting college in a new state, surrounded by a small community who were already in friend groups, was challenging.

I regret a lot of my actions in my first year at college. There were people who were nice to me, and very obviously wanted to be friends with me, but my emotional state was in turmoil and I ended up burning a lot of bridges because I couldn’t handle the environment.

Since then I’ve tried to be more open to these opportunities. A few have been more successful than most. Thankfully, my roommate situation has mostly been positive. The roommates who stayed have been memorable and grown to be close friends. Other roommates either left after one semester or were rarely around.

My biggest hurdle when making friends was, and still is, first impressions. I’m terrible when it comes to first impressions because I clam up. I’m like an emotional void where I need to be comfortable around someone to act like I ‘normally’ would. And that could take awhile. By the time I’m comfortable to show them who I actually am they could have decided long ago to stay away from me. I’ve been working on it, but my progress has seemed minimal over the years.

The best I’ve ever felt naturally me was my previous job, the movie theatre. The job has a high rotation of employees, and because of how long I was there I naturally felt comfortable. That was probably the first place where I wanted people to know I’m friendly and could be approachable. Since the job had a spectrum of ages, and most people finding it as a not-so-fun job, I wanted to try and make the day easygoing for whoever was on that day. In a way, that approach might have made me open up faster.

I think I need to remember that going forward. Part of making friends is being comfortable in who you are, but at the same time not everyone will like who you are. In the last couple of years I miraculously found someone I felt comfortable around. It’s insane how comfortable I felt around them because people who I consider good friends I still feel I can’t fully be comfortable around, but with this person it felt natural. I don’t think I can truly convey the emotions I felt when coming to understand that talking to this person felt as natural as breathing and I felt safe enough to talk about any part of my life. Every day was a treat with them there. For once I felt like I could be myself without any emotional shield in the way, but I ruined it in the end.

A part of me feels like I’ll never find someone like that again. But I’m not convinced that one-in-a-billion person should be the goal. They were a gift, for a short time, and a reminder that I have a lot more I need to work on before I can find more friends.

I am the outlier when it comes to my family. My grandmother is a social butterfly who talks on the phone with her friends every day. My mother has a large friend group that she keeps in contact with every day and goes out with multiple times a week. Even my uncle is super social. He can talk to anyone. Every time he comes over he has new stories to tell about people he’s met. Then there’s me. I know I shouldn’t compare myself, but it’s hard not to when your family is outgoing and has solid friend circles.

I have a lot to work on in this department and I think I need to start with healing myself. I believe a lot of my root concerns stems from anxiety and past experiences, and hopefully, if I’m to work through that, I’ll one day be able to join my family in having a small community of friends that I can talk to every day.

Be Authentic

I find it hard to be myself.

There’s always a mask whenever I’m on a job or simply paying a cashier. I build a wall to protect myself, because one way or another whenever I let my true self through people eventually grow distant around me. So, I think I created this mask in order to be accepted, and because of that people have the wrong idea about me when I’m comfortable enough to hide the mask away. To them, I turned into someone else and made them on edge, furthering our communication divide.

I hate the term ‘authentic’ because for the last 10 years it’s been used as a buzzword, whether as part of a dating profile or a film. Some aspect of life is marketed as ‘authentic,’ and in my eyes the word stopped truly meaning its definition a long time ago. But, there is a vein of truth attached to the sentiment.

I haven’t been authentic to myself. In my need to preserve a mask I’ve left characteristics of my adult identity to the curb. Mostly for fear of turning people off of who I am. When I transitioned into my 20s, I started gaining new interests and at the time those interests were not liked by my friends. Then when I made new friends, and thought about sharing my interests with them, they too did not appreciate what fascinated me, and so I locked those interests in my mind’s closet whenever I interacted with people.

Slowly, over the last couple years, I’ve come to terms with what interests define me as an adult and how I’ve hardly explored them in my 20s because of a few bad experiences of sharing them with people I thought I was close with. There are passions and hobbies and subjects that I want to desperately explore unabashed, and for the first time in a long while I feel hopeful about that prospect.

A New Leaf

Hopefully, this post hasn’t come off like a self-serving pity party. There is ache all over this writing, but hopefully the positivity of recognition with a passion to go beyond my faults made it through.

Like I stated at the beginning, I do feel hope. I’ll need to push myself through the tunnel of emotional problems I’ve nurtured, but this time I see the light at the end. Escaping and resolving my problems feel tangible more than ever.

I’m excited to step into the world.

I’m excited to see where I go as I grow.

There are plenty of other goals that I fear are too ambition to even think of at the moment, but I’ll get there eventually.

I’m not the same person I was as a teenager. I’m done changing who I am to fit in with everyone as I did in my 20s. It’s time to live for myself and be excited for myself. It’ll still be a long journey yet, and the first hurdles that I’ve laid out here are still a big obstacle, but for the first time in a long time I think I see the path and I’m ready to see where it takes me.