Birthday letters (IV)

Coming of age / turning 30

Hi. It’s my 30th birthday today. October 7th, 2025 also marks two years since Israel began its genocide on the people of Gaza. I recommend subscribing to Gaza Champions for up-to-date fundraisers to help families in need — and I urge you to consider donating if you can.

Over the last few years, I shared 29 romances, 28 lessons, and 27 vignettes. This year, here’s a bildungsroman¹:

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1.

Late summer, in the park one evening surrounded by ten of my closest friends — I found myself in an idyll. Summer wasn’t over yet, but something was ending. This much bliss couldn’t last forever. The others’ faces showed no indication that they harbored a shared sense of loss. I tried to shake off that faraway sound of a door closing, that the best we’d ever be was in this moment, that we were beautiful and candid and entirely unaware of everything we had that we soon wouldn’t anymore.

Nothing was over, as far as I could map. Many things were changing, and I could rationalize that change does entail certain endings. My boyfriend and I were about to move into our first apartment together. I was starting a new job after months of interviews. Some friends were considering adopting dogs, moving apartments, breaking up, getting back together. My sister had gotten married. Shifts, definitely, but I saw them as changes, not endings. Most happy, if not hard won, arrivals and reconfigurations of routines that once felt comfortable enough to settle into indefinitely.

Darkness continued its slow inching toward the park. We’d all have to leave soon, go home to make dinner, and in only a few short hours after sleep, head to work and repeat day after day. Had I really fallen into such a provincial life? It was then I knew what the end of summer signaled. In just a month and a half, I’d turn thirty. My twenties were ending—I was about to come of age. My youth, while not quite gone, was certainly closer to ending than beginning.

The idea of coming of age had been on my mind, as I’d spent most of the summer reading Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. Primarily a novel of ideas, it’s also a classic European bildungsroman. The hero of the novel Hans Catsorp spends seven years avoiding adulthood (and the workforce), opting instead to convalesce in a Swiss sanatorium. At the seven hundred page novel’s end, Mann turns the genre on its head—the expectation, in classic bildungsroman fashion, is that Hans will have learned something profound enough that he succeeds in growing up. That doesn’t exactly happen. Sure, he bats around ideologies and flirts with capital-I ideas, but eventually leaves the sanatorium only to die in a war. He’s come of age only for his life to end before he gets the ending he deserves.

Now that I had almost completed the years that would comprise my own coming of age novel, I felt more like Hans—at an ending with no greater self-knowledge than when I began my twenties. An ending that wasn’t quite fit for an ending. While I hadn’t visited the Swiss mountains and failed to return, what did I have to show for the years that had lapsed since I began my so-called education? Is the story ending? Is there anything left to write about, or is it just that I have nothing left to say? Had I come of age, or did I waste precious years romancing ideas and not getting them down?

Plagued by these questions I couldn’t ask out loud, I fell into sullenness, channeling my most brooding inner protagonist. I was too afraid of what my own answers would be if I let myself reveal the bad sutures of my ever bleeding heart. Was the lens of romanticism through which I have always viewed my life finally coming into focus? I could recognize the life I dreamed of and the life I live as distinct parts of a whole, though not completely merged. Was this where I was arriving as I had come of age, an arms length away from completion?

A few weeks later, my first New York friend and I left a different park on one of those cool September nights that trick you into believing autumn’s arrived. I told him about this essay, how I’d been struggling to write the final chapter of my bildungsroman, write anything at all. He recalled a moment from the beginning of his own decade, years before we knew each other. He was in Canterbury on his twentieth birthday. His friend told him that everything worth writing about happens before your twenties. He was starting to believe she was right.

This stopped me in my tracks. In the twilight of my twenties, I knew these years had provided me with enough worthwhile material. I just wasn’t so certain anymore that I could write it.

2.

A body in motion tends to stay in motion. I blinked and my late twenties passed. A carousel of every moment, ecstatic and devastating. My life in the city began with a rupture. The end of the former era wasn’t a boom so much as the slow collapse of college furniture we’d been dragging along for years. We wished to just be simple again, but we’d outgrown each other. For the first time in six years, I was alone. Soon I was spinning in circles around an upstairs karaoke bar, singing my favorite sad songs the night before I had the keys to my first apartment. Just a room really in a neighborhood where I knew no one. The next day I had a chance run-in with a writer acquaintance from another life. We walked across the bridge back to Brooklyn. I believed in signs then, and probably still do.

Then began my first summer. With open arms, I was invited into friend groups by people I barely knew. Testing them all for size. Regrettably callous, tensile allegiances, frayed ends. Quick to thicken, quick to thin. That first Fourth of July, freezing in the park, unsure where I could squeeze myself. If there was a hole big enough for me to fill. Days and days not recorded in journals I used to fastidiously keep. I was moving faster than ever. Before I knew it, something like a new life had formed a soft shell around me. My mother worried as any mother would about my health. But my body was changing with every passing day, becoming stronger and more certain.

Party after party, searching for someone I couldn’t place and coming up short. Asking too many questions without any expectation of satisfying answers. At turns feeling too old for all of it, and a beginner for even more of it. I was experiencing my early twenties in my late ones. Talking about books with strangers in crammed apartments, fire code be damned. The floor was always about to cave in with the sheer weight of expectation of what would happen to me next. Showing up at literary readings, always feeling on the outside of circles that don’t exist. Everyone feels that way, I find out years later. Long sunrise walks home through this neighborhood I swear on with my best friend, impromptu sleepovers that dissolved into giggles that would wake my roommate. Relationships forged by these chance encounters. Where would I ever be without you?

Some of it was not lost, but not well spent. Partially squandered. A wastrel youth studded with regrettable dates and unrequited love that now burns my cheeks. Flinging myself at people who didn’t fit. It’s better to go where you’re wanted, Charlotte taught me. Scared to death that I wasn’t good enough for those who didn’t give me their undivided time. One night outside of Central Park, running through the sprinklers and afraid of getting caught, I was close to knowing enough was enough. How much love I deserved wasn’t a performance indicator I could argue for against my self-worth. I stopped begging for humiliation, dove into the wreck to find something like the grace of admitting I didn’t deserve punishment.

I wanted to part ways with the bad times, say goodbye to the few good times so I could puzzle it back together, find some way I could face who I was and not shrink away. Only half tied to this idea of self, what I would do to give myself away if only someone asked.

Glowing nights into which I ventured out again. Swore I would stay sensitive to serendipity. I was only half looking. Under a marquee and gray sky, you appeared. Stopped my breakneck velocity. A streak of my bad luck ended. Accidents can’t happen if you’re careful. I was done being precious. At the time, we swore we’d move slow but we went faster than any car would go.

I became convinced we were meant to meet again. But really it was only a matter of coincidences piling up until it’s something special until it’s love until it’s the different kind of love until it’s hard conversations until it’s understanding each other like never before until it’s us sitting on our couch deciding what furniture goes where in our new apartment until it’s enough to be right here. Any number of choices could have led us elsewhere. No reason to agonize over those decisions, something totally without consequence may be the thing that changes your life. I’ve known you ten years but only loved you for two of them, but that doesn’t feel quite accurate. You’re the edge of all I know.

How else can I describe it? The world that I was cracked open. A new wholeness I didn’t expect. New friends streamed in. My routines started to mirror your smallest rhythms. I became a part of it all. Sometimes I let myself imagine what would have happened if we didn’t meet. Friends who live in these neighboring blocks would’ve just been strangers in a coffee shop I didn’t frequent. Just missing each other, that hole that would persist if I had been a second or two later than I was in arriving. But that’s true of everything.

When you’re happy, there’s not much of a story. I had everything I’ve always wanted because I get everything I want. Except for that one thing. The book. I finished it, sent it into the world, but then the rejection piled up and suddenly I couldn’t write. What was I made for if I couldn’t do this one thing? If I could just remember how to do the things I know how to do already. Did I stop living when I stopped writing? A novel written, submitted, put in a drawer for now. Nights at my various desks, or in bed, composing and composing, wondering if the toil was worth it. Endless feedback loops, make noise, remind people you exist and what you do. I’ve always been soft spoken.

So I almost quit. The heartbreak of almost leaving behind the only thing capable of saving me. My letters of devotion are no good. The missives I’ve tried to send to make you understand my love. These essays, a whole book. Poems I spent years aching to abandon, only for them to doggedly find me. One afternoon my father sent me this Ray Bradbury passage right after I told you I’m ready to quit for good: Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The key word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for.

3.

We’re on our way to a birthday party. We’ll be some of the first guests to arrive, so there’s time to kill. The sun is setting again, earlier and earlier with every lost day. Nostalgia crawls up under my thin shirt with the cooling breeze. Always fall when the year seems to be actually over. But nothing really is. You tell me not to give up. That you believe in me. My work is worthwhile, to go the hard way is most likely the only way to get where I need to go. Was this at twenty-one or twenty-nine? Last week or last year? Was it my first love or my best friend or the love of my life or my lost friend or my parents or my mentor or my sister or a stranger with tears in her eyes on the floor of a house I won’t return to? Was it me, was it ever me?

I’ve always had a breakneck desire to get to the good future I so desperately wanted. Some assurance that everything I worked hard for was guaranteed to be mine. Thinking I was so old when really I was young enough to not realize it takes years and years to come of age.

Here I am. My education has ended — or has it? An unassuming young woman was passing, in early autumn, from her twenties to her thirties, from experience to wisdom, from her past self to her future self. She went up to the magic mountain and came back down, more herself than ever before. Something did change. Some day something will shift and she will be somewhere else in the process. Somewhere there’s a version of her who understands the value of delayed gratification. She finally understands there’s no single revelation, no achievement, no masterpiece done to complete her. Instead of asking what next, the question is what now, and there’s no immediate answer.

The task is different now that I’ll be an adult. The work is still there but the work changes. A plea to just be enough — not more or less than anyone else. To have my desires adequately satisfied rather than letting them unmoor me to the point of being consumed. To stand on another rooftop and still be wowed by the city I live in like I was three years ago when I first arrived. To have that be enough, to configure my corner of the universe into something legible. To be read, maybe, but to be understood. Like a dog drawn to an open wound and licking it immediately. Every year alive I am reminded how much animals know. To be that attuned to my own healing. To know how to find what will make me better. In the center of a crowd, immersed in the sound, remembering it is within me to respond. To not overexplain myself. I have only been searching for an explanation that I haven’t yet heard. Loving is only an extension of all of this. To love someone like I do my own ambition, to want in parity the other thing I want most in this life. And to know that I haven’t been broken down by it.

I’m still a body in motion, but I’m slowing my pace to something steadier. One foot in front of the other on the concrete, propelling myself in a direction, right or not. More deliberate, and with less ambivalence than before. I have no idea where I’m going but I know. And once I arrive, if there’s something bright and gleaming there, then I’ll stop obsessing over the light and simply become it.

1. A bildungsroman is a genre of novel that follows a young protagonist as they develop morally and/or psychologically. The word translates from German as “a novel of education” or “a novel of formation.”