(Photo credit: naught_facility)

Today, I am thirty-one. I was not scared to turn thirty. In fact, I was thrilled. I boasted to everyone about my dirty-thirty celebration. I wore it like a badge I had earned. I had felt thirty already for some time. Mature yet still youthful. To me, thirty meant I AM WOMAN, HEAR ME ROAR. It meant I was finally in my prime. I could balance myself carefully between two decades, keeping my twenties close enough to me when it felt necessary. Thirty-one scares me. No, it frightens me. It means I have no more excuses. I am now IN my thirties.

At this time, I have to remind myself of all the things thirty-one years has given me:

1. Be Lauren. Never again will I be ashamed of my undying love for Billy Joel, and the gap in David Letterman’s teeth. I will forever hate asymmetry. And you can forget your taffeta dreams of catching the bouquet on my future wedding day. You do you, and I’ll do me.
2. My parents are not always right. Mom, Dad, sorry. You were right most of the time; I’ll give you that. But when I came to you crying in grade school and you said, “Boys are just intimidated by you,” you were wrong. You were also wrong about the silver dress imitating a disco ball you approved of for the Valentine’s Day dance. But I always knew you had good intentions.
3. Imperfection is profoundly more beautiful than perfection. And not to mention, much more attainable. From the paint peeling off the edges of my antique dresser, to the small scar on my forehead, and to the grammatical errors I made in my last post; they are all much more beautiful that way.
4. Girlfriends are gold. Never again will I underestimate the power of having good girlfriends in my life. Through the roughest times in my life, no one had my back more than other women.
5. Keep moving. After a break up. After a family loss. After closing the door on what was once thought to be a life-long friend. My mother has always taught me to keep moving. Distractions are the last things desired during grief, but they hold the power to heal, whether in discovering new passions, or revisiting old passions. Keep moving is also literal. Exercise releases endorphins and endorphins are medicine. For me, I have found that nothing heals better than writing it all out, dancing like a fool to Hall and Oates with the door shut, and running against the direction of the wind while my ear drums vibrate.
6. Music is powerful. My fondest memories revolve around music. Dancing in my grandparents’ lake house to Boston Pops and The Beatles with my cousins. Choreographing dance routines to Michael Jackson songs with my neighborhood friends. Listening to my cousin play my grandfather’s organ while my aunts wept. My twin sister and I singing “Wild Thing” into our hairbrushes. …My twin sister recording me imitating Mariah Carey’s high pitched squeal without me knowing. Crying when Kurt Cobain took his own life, and feeling ill when classmates wore his note on their baggy-tees. Discovering Radiohead. Listening to The Strokes on blast in our college cruiser with my sister and the windows rolled down. Swooning over Zach Condon’s crooning voice. Listening to Band of Horses and The Black Keys while crashing into trees down the drunken river with friends.
7. Writing is my meditation.
8. I cannot change others, nor do I want to try. I have made this mistake many times. Whether in a relationship or in a friendship, no one will or can change for anyone but themselves. And sometimes the only thing that needs changing is their outlook of compatibility with me.
9. Bad relationships are disposable. No one is irreplaceable. It does not matter how long someone has been in my life. No one is irreplaceable. If anyone continues to act as such, I will prove them wrong. We are all worth more than that. Even the instigator.
10. Be as gentle with yourself as you are with others, if not more. I have spent the majority of my life giving others countless excuses, while giving myself none. Why? I’m going to make mistakes and plenty of them. Mistakes have their place in life. The only mistake that should allow me to feel shameful is the one I never grow or learn from and move beyond.
11. Live in the moment. Pleasant trips down memory lane and dreams for the future in healthy doses can be nice, but more than that is only harmful. I will never build more memories if I am constantly thinking about what should have been, or what might happen.
12. Live for the journey, not the outcome. The arrival fallacy is real. If I live for the outcome, I can almost always expect to be disappointed. The tunnel, where at the end there is a light, should shine much brighter.
13. Never settle. For men. For friends. For the color on my walls. I will never stray from what I truly want in order to fill a void.
14. Fake it until you make it. One of the best pieces of advice from my mother. If I should ever feel afraid; fake confidence until it is felt. If I should ever feel sad; smile, until it becomes real. I am in complete control of my feelings, and you of yours. You may try to shake me, but I have a secret weapon that works every time.
15. Happiness is the only thing that matters.
16. Blood is thicker than water. I should spend every day appreciating my family, forgiving them for their mistakes, and laughing at their jokes… even when they are not funny.
17. People are honest. For the most part, people will tell you what they want you to hear, and what they are after, and usually within the first time of meeting them. We all just have to get better at listening to it, even when its encrypted, and sometimes only in actions. Hearing what we want to hear is not included.
18. Knowledge is everything.
19. I don’t know everything. Nor do I ever want to claim to. In fact, as I grow older, the more questions I have, the more intelligent I feel. It’s a strange phenomenon.
20. I don’t need to be famous to mean something. When I was younger, I dreamed of being a famous ballerina (do you know of many!?), a famous rock star, and then a famous actress. I thought that the only way I would matter was to be famous. Then I became a teacher, and instantly knew I was wrong.
21. Do what you love. And it is never too late to go back to the things you once loved, yet abandoned.
22. There will always be someone more attractive, more hilarious, and more intelligent than me. So what? Jealousy is an unproductive emotion. Jealousy accomplishes the exact opposite of what it sets out to do. Celebrate each other and you will instantly grow more attractive, more hilarious, and more intelligent.
23. Labels weigh less than an ounce. People always want to think they know you better than you know yourself. Do you know this to be true? Of course not. Even they know on some level, it’s a total fallacy, but for some reason people feel better doing it. Categorizing people we don’t know helps us to cope with the fact that we don’t fully understand them, yet. Tell those naysayers to shove their label makers where the sun doesn’t shine, or flick them off one by one. After all, each label weighs less than an ounce.
24. People will surprise you. On the same token, never think you know someone more than they know themselves. And, hold the expectations, let people surprise you. It’s no fun holding up a heavy pedestal, and waiting for them to rise above it.
25. Worship the skin you’re in. In Middle School, I used to hate my butt and my early developments. Boys endlessly teased me by slapping my rear end as I walked up the stairs. My wild hair wept when it met a comb. I dreamed of sleek slick hair almost every night. On really special occasions, before the straightening iron was invented, I spent hours upon hours under the heat of a blowdryer until my arms grew numb. I hated my self-proclaimed plain dark brown hair. After High School, when I was finally able to change its color, I must have dyed it every other color under the sun. I sometimes wore a minimum two-inch heel to make myself look taller, even when I was walking into a grocery store. I remember crying to my poor guy friend over the phone, “I WANT TO BE SEXY, NOT CUTE!” Then suddenly, to my surprise, I discovered that girls in college were stuffing their bras. Sometimes even their jeans. Girls were scalding their hair on curling irons and teasing it to death. While the straightening iron became my best friend, hairspray became theirs. We all wanted to be someone different. It took a long time to get to where I am today, but now I wouldn’t want to be anyone other than me. I have grown to love my wild brown hair, my curves, and my petite stature. Besides, bootylicious was added to the Oxford English Dictionary. Thanks Beyonce.
26. Get eight hours of sleep every night. Drink eight glasses of water every day.
27. Forgiveness is not for others, it’s for yourself. If I were to hold onto everything that anybody ever did to me that I deemed wrong, I would be ill. One thing my sister taught me is that people are only after their own happiness. They don’t always mean to be hurtful. But sometimes they do. Either way, they are only doing what they think will make them happy. Instead, it is temporary pleasure, or madness… whichever. Regardless of whether they are right or not, shouldn’t matter to you. That’s for them to figure out. Forgiving doesn’t mean forgetting. It simply means letting go.
28. Listen more. Recently, in preparation for teaching an upcoming class novel, I read the phrase “Everyone has their own agenda,” over and over again in Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech. This means more to me now than it would have when I was in middle school. I have realized over time that everyone wants others to know their problems, listen to their problems, feel their problems, understand their problems, yet we all have our own personal agendas. When will anyone ever stop, take a breath, and listen? Sometimes we must oblige.
29. Be lighthearted.
30. The right person will not love you until you love yourself. Emphasis on right person. Emphasis on love. I’ve learned this by allowing the wrong person in, and I confused it with real love. I didn’t love myself enough, and he only thought he loved me because he didn’t love himself. Both people need to love themselves before there is room for more. The heart is a muscle. Each time it is torn, it is built up again to be even stronger, just as we intentionally do when working out. If we don’t give our muscles love, lard will replace those vacant areas. We need to build more muscle in order to gain more muscle.
31. Elton John was singing about a “Tiny Dancer”… not “Tony Danza.”