Feeling Lost at 30? Join The Club

Edited by: Merritt Dailey

I just married the love of my life two months ago. I have a thriving business promoting a mission that I truly believe in. I live in an incredible community that makes me happy and fulfilled. And I’m lucky enough to have these things at 31.

I have so much more agency than my grandmother did. She's a woman who gave birth to 8 children by the time she was my age. But I also recognize a kinship beyond our genes. I see a woman pulled along by the tidal forces of her culture; sometimes I feel swept up by the same. 

So…why do I still feel like there’s something more, something I haven’t fully grasped? Like a hard ball of sand, molded yet still slipping through the cracks of my white knuckles.

I know I can’t be alone in this feeling, right? It’s so easy to rationalize away by thinking “Things are going great! What do I feel this for?” But this feeling isn’t always -- or often -- a rational feeling. It comes from comparing what’s going on in my life to what’s going on in the lives of everyone around me, or as my husband likes to say, “Keeping up with the Joneses” (with that reference I should believe he is a 1920s ghost who has come back to haunt me, but he is a hot ghost if that’s the case, so I can accept my fate).

Feeling this indescribable feeling can mean different things to different people. Let me explain what it means to me: I sometimes wonder if I’m making the right decisions about my business and career; I second guess the timing my husband and I have chosen to have kids -- even though we’ve been thinking and talking about our plan for years; I fantasize about picking up and traveling around the world or living in Italy again just to eat pizza, guzzle wine, and stare at the rolling hills. I still think and feel these things even though I really, really enjoy my life.

If you haven’t read ”All Fours” by Miranda July, now is the time to stop reading this and binge read that.

Truly. Because Miranda July really understands this feeling as a woman in today’s world. She doesn’t hit the nail on the head, she hits the nail *inside* the head and makes you feel the most seen you’ve ever felt in your entire life.

In some ways, the main character in “All Fours” is a woman many in this country can identify with. A 40-something mother, struggling to balance the demands of career, family, and her heterosexual partnership, while confronting her changing body and perimenopause. In other ways, the character is one of the more radical women to have ever been put to page. [Spoilers ahead] In the earliest miles of a road trip, she takes a detour at a motel. She ends up staying 2 weeks, spending $20,000 to renovate a room she doesn't own, and falling in love (and becoming obsessed) with her interior designer’s husband.

We witness the agony, the ecstasy, of her newly discovered desire; we follow as she challenges her understanding of her body and its capacity for sexual pleasure. We’re invited into her exuberance as she opens up her marriage and takes up a lesbian lover (and I RSVP’d, YES). She is a woman unleashed, leading her life with desire. At times she teeters, and I wondered: is she wrecking cherished elements of her life in an act of selfishness, including her long term stable partnership, or is she wrecking the normative forces that told her what to want, and prodded her into blindly agreeing to them? Yet page after page I saw myself in her. Through whisper networks and quiet meetings, women of all types are sharing their identification with her too.

July writes with such intimacy and closeness with the reader that I didn’t even realize I didn’t know the protagonist’s name until after I finished reading the book. She doesn’t have one. Because she is me, I am her. And she is you, too. 

There is so much pressure on women in particular to have it together, to know where we’re headed, to be responsible, to think about all aspects of our future. To lift the mental load of family, children, finances, purchasing decisions.

But I wonder if my feeling is an energy, a pulse, a yearning to go beyond what I’ve always done, which is to do the thing that is “correct” or “logical.” To do what I’m told; to follow the flow of the cultural mores, just as my grandmother did. I’m not quite sure but I know that I’ll be wrestling with this feeling for a long, long time.

So, if you’re feeling something remotely like this and want to be a bit more understood, “All Fours” is waiting for you.

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