Settling Down

Being at the cusp of 30 is giving me a lot of "what am I doing with my life, this isn't what I wanted, what am I going to do, oh no" energy. I'm going to talk about it, because there's a very good chance I'm not the only one.

The hardest part about infertility for me has nothing to do with not being able to produce offspring anymore. I've been emotionally confronting that for all of my adult life. I made my peace with that a long time ago. The hardest part for me has been the irreconcilable, unavoidable, and the unanswerable question of "what do I do now?"

I had invested a lot of myself into something that I had on good authority would never happen. That was my purpose, my ambition, my dream, my aspiration in life: to be a good parent. To me, that was what what my image of happiness, success, and fulfillment looked like. I had to accept that life isn't obligated to give me the things I want, just because I want them. I also learned, from watching a lot of people, that even if I had gotten what I said I wanted, there's still no guarantee it would've made me happy.

Happiness and satisfaction with life is not about getting what I want. It's not about making my life match up with the exact vision I had as a younger, more naive version of myself. Younger me was an idiot! Like, guys. Why on earth am I letting the half-baked ambitions I had when I was 18 determine the sense of accomplishment I'm allowed to feel at this stage of my life? She didn't even know how to do her own laundry! She had no sense of what she truly wanted, what would've made her happy, or what was achievable with the resources at her disposal. In fact, if she could see where I am today and everything I have now, I think she'd be pretty stunned, to be honest.

First of all, I got married. Marriage is forming a partnership with another person. My sense of self didn't disappear. My dreams and ambitions didn't cease to be important. But they exist together with the life of someone else now. How to go about those things with another person became part of how I go through life and look at the world. 

In the experience I've had so far, it works best when I have the ability to think outside of myself. Everything I'm doing doing can't just be about one person (whether it's me or him) getting what we want all the time. We're not building His life and Her life, like matching towels. We're building our life together. And for each of us, that has meant giving up things we both wanted for the sake of our combined happiness.

There are times in marriage where we want things that are the exact opposite of one another. Like, completely irreconcilable. And in those moments, I have a choice. 

• He gets what he wants. 
• I get what I want. 
• We come up with a new solution for us, together. 

Now, if we choose the third enough times, we'll eventually wake up one day and realize we've created a life together that neither one of us envisioned for ourselves. A life we've both sacrificed to create. We've both have given up stuff we wanted, or at least getting it in the way we imagined. But neither of us should be desperately unhappy. After all, we made those compromises together.

It may not be the life I planned for. But it's the life I chose. And if I can look at it still say "You know what? This is pretty effing sweet. Especially since this person I adore is still in it with me," I'm recognizing I have everything I need to be happy. 

Why? 

Because happiness is more than just an emotion I feel, or a condition imposed upon me by my circumstances. Happiness comes from how I respond to whatever I have to work with. If I wake up every day and can start my day with a "Hell yeah!" Even if I have to dig really deep to find it, then I am successful! Others may consider my life to be "ordinary." It may look nothing like what I thought it would when I was young. 

 But is that a problem?

What if life isn't mean to be this constant experience of constantly achieving something else, something more, something greater than what I already have?

What if incremental improvement throughout the vicissitudes of life is it? Because if it is, that means I can let go of so much needless stress and pressure to constantly become what I wanted to be when I grew up. 

I can let myself be happy exactly where I am.

 And really, what better gift can I give myself for my 30th than that?