The Third Decade
THE THIRD DECADE
For years, thirty had existed as this distant checkpoint in my head – an age occupied by proper adults who had their lives figured out, owned sensible furniture and probably knew what they were doing with their pensions.
And then, seemingly out of nowhere, there I was. Thirty years old. Still figuring things out, still chasing adventures, still making questionable decisions and, somehow, happier with my life than I had ever been. I guess milestone birthdays have a way of forcing you to look backwards before you can move forwards.
And when I looked back at my twenties? I barely recognised the person who had entered them. In the space of ten years, I lost people I loved, fell in and out of love, became a doctor, abandoned the career I thought I wanted, travelled across the world, found new families, rediscovered old passions and built a life that twenty-year-old me could never have imagined. Some of those years were absolutely brutal. Others were the best of my life. Most were a chaotic mixture of both.
So before stepping into whatever the hell my thirties had in store for me, I wanted to give that decade the send-off it deserved.
Eight Years, One Day
My birthday had always been bittersweet. It wasn’t just the fact that, with every passing year, I was getting closer to my grave. The older I grew, the more in love I fell with living, and so mortality had always been something I chose not to dwell on too much. But it was something I inevitably had to confront around my birthday, especially cause my father had died just one day before it.
This year marked the eighth anniversary of his death. Eight whole years. Eight years since I had got that numbing call from my mum telling me to go to the hospital. Eight years since I had rushed there, leaving everything behind. Eight years since I had last heard his voice, since I had felt his final breath leave him, since he had finally got to rest, since we had said our goodbyes.
You know, on most days, I didn’t even think about him. Hell, I could barely remember what he had looked like or what his voice had sounded like. I tried to actively recall those things but, try as I might, I could never quite manage it. Then there were the tiny, seemingly insignificant things that reminded me of him. Like this silver mermaid keychain of his that I had always wanted as a kid, which I had shamelessly snatched up the second he died. Or this taxidermy lovebird he had got from God knows where – terrible, I know. Or his old Beatles records – timeless and probably worth a fortune!
As difficult as it had become to cling to the precious memories I had of him, with time I realised that he had left me with far more than a handful of old trinkets. My love for nature, for example, was something he had instilled in me for as long as I could remember. He used to take my brother and me to his field all the time, where we would spend hours ploughing, tilling, watering and doing whatever else needed to be done. He grew everything – potatoes and tomatoes, cauliflower and broccoli, oranges and lemons, apples and pears. And flowers. Gorgeous, gorgeous flowers. Irises, dahlias, daffodils, roses, sunflowers – you name it, and he probably grew it. Carnations were his favourite. Man, did I miss having them around our home!
We also had a summer house by the beach, where we spent most of our summers. He would take us swimming and we’d spend hours snorkelling together. Painted combers, rainbow wrasses, parrotfish and damselfish – these were creatures I had already become intimately familiar with as a kid. As much as I loved all of that, adolescence eventually pulled me away from it. Nature stopped being fun. Hanging out with friends, partying, drinking, smoking, having sex? Now that was where it was at! Until that got boring too. Little did I know back then that I would spend much of the rest of my life trying to find my way back to that place and time. And by then, I found myself reconnecting with nature, reconnecting with my past and, most importantly, reconnecting with my dad.
Then there were the things that I somehow started sharing with him only after he died. When he passed away, he had left me enough money to do whatever the hell I wanted for a few years, at least. I chose to spend a sizeable chunk of it on a trip to Colombia with my then-boyfriend Pedro. That trip, as I have repeated again and again, shaped the rest of my life in more ways than one. Leaving Europe for the first time felt as though I had left an old life behind. Swimming off tropical beaches, trekking through jungles, rafting down rivers, paragliding over canyons, getting my first taste of Latin American life – all of that had happened thanks to him. From then onwards, travelling became something I associated with my dad. Weirdly enough, he had been an avid traveller himself when he was young. It was something he had largely stopped doing once my brother and I came into the picture, and something we had never really discussed.
And eight years down the line, I might not have remembered exactly what he had looked like or the sound of his voice, but somehow I felt more connected to him than ever. Sometimes, against all odds and against all logic, it felt as though he was right there beside me.
Thirty Years Alive
Ageing and mortality aside, I wasn’t normally one to celebrate my birthday for another reason – mostly cause I didn’t consider it an achievement. It certainly wasn’t something I had achieved entirely by myself. So what if I had managed to revolve around the sun one more time?
That said, I had been through so many “I’m not gonna make it out of this one!” moments over the years that somehow reaching the age of thirty did feel like an achievement of sorts. Whether it was dropping a tank into the middle of the ocean or finding myself stranded on a mountainside, descending a massive waterfall without ropes or being chased by an angry seagull in the middle of the road, tumbling down a hill on my bike or eating some dodgy pepitoria from a roadside stop, I had done at least a million things that could have left me for dead! So yeah, this particular birthday counted as an achievement in my books, and so I chose to celebrate it.
But I chose to celebrate it for more than simply surviving thirty years of life. Much like I had celebrated my twentieth, with a surprise birthday party thrown by my bestest friends in the whole wide world – who were still very much my BFITWWW – I wanted my thirtieth to celebrate an entire decade. My twenties. And, as an ode to the past, I decided to summarise my twenties using an acronym I had come up with during my period of awakening – that strange signpost in my life when I had felt as though I had gained consciousness for the first time.
It was something I used to go on and on about: LAW. Love. Adventure. Wisdom. To me, these had become the cornerstones of a well-rounded life. Together, they represented my own version of what it meant to live fully – a life moving towards eudaimonia, or human flourishing. And so, there it went.
Oh boy. Where did I even start? What a long and tortuous path that one had been. But I decided to divide it into the different forms of love, much like I had done all those years before:
- Eros: My twenties had begun with me pining for my college sweetheart – the very same person with whom absolutely nothing ever happened despite my unrequited love for her. It might have been that teenage, movie-like kinda love that was overly idealised and all too unrealistic, but looking back, it had been the first time I had ever felt that way about someone, at least until Scout came into the picture. Needless to say, my romanticism took quite a blow when things didn’t quite pan out. Then I experimented in Manchester and came out as bisexual. Thereafter, I met Pedro – the person I had loved most romantically since, and the longest relationship I had ever had. After a heart-wrenching break-up, one that I kinda needed if I was going to keep growing, there followed a seemingly endless succession of mini-relationships. All of them had been beautiful experiences that I would forever cherish, stored safely inside their shiny, happy little bubbles. Sadly, my ridiculous belief in movie-like romance persisted. Destiny simply hadn’t helped me out with that one yet.
- Philautia: Then there was self-love. I had started my twenties riddled with self-doubt and low self-esteem. By thirty? I was probably the opposite. Once I found a sense of purpose, so many other pieces seemed to fall into place. I felt good about myself. Actually, I was in love with myself. I was so in love with myself that sometimes I found it difficult to love anyone else. I never imagined that I could ever feel that way about myself back then.
- Philia: I guess my relationship with friendship hadn’t changed much at all. My friends had been my family for as long as I was old enough to know better, and they still were. I made more friends along the way, some of whom became family too. I had my Momma Bear, Alessia was my ride or die, Daisy was my sister, and then there were so many others who had transformed my life into this beautiful mosaic of people, memories and experiences. I had gone from feeling unwanted and like the perpetual odd one out to becoming a friend whom others actively sought out and appreciated for who he was. For that, I was so, so grateful. Then there was the other side of family. I had lost the one person whom I truly loved, while my relationship with my mother and brother seemed as irreparable as it had been back then – if not worse. I had done my best to reconnect with my mother but, once again, my efforts seemed to be in vain. It killed me that she had put me in that position again. As excited as I was about turning thirty, she couldn’t have seemed to care less, sending me a crisp €50 bank transfer without so much as the yearly birthday card. Once again, money was not love.
- Agape: My understanding of agape had changed over the years too. I had lost all connection with organised religion, save for the occasional unavoidable encounter such as my father’s funeral or Momma Bear’s wedding. Yet somehow, I had found a kind of spirituality that I once would have been sceptical of. When confronted with the sheer greatness of nature, I often found myself wondering how on earth all of it could have come into existence so randomly. I might not have believed in a god per se, but I did believe in the universe and its, at times, seemingly magical ways.
A few weeks into my twenties, I took my first-ever trip to Barcelona. Let’s just say it had been a whirlwind ever since. Thirty-six countries across five continents – and counting. But it hadn’t really been about how many countries I visited. It was about all the experiences I had lived through and everything I had learnt along the way. Forever inspired by my all-time favourite manga, One Piece, I had spent years joking that I wanted to become a pirate. Yet somewhere along the way, in my relentless pursuit of adventure, I started to feel like maybe I actually had. And so, let’s summarise yet another pedestal:
- Landscapes: I had trekked across mountains, glaciers, volcanoes, cliffs, deserts, wetlands, forests, swamps, jungles and canyons. I had swum in oceans, lakes, ponds, rivers and pools. I had wandered through enormous cities and tiny rural villages. Somewhere along the way, I had managed to take my tiny, tiny world – one that had once consisted almost entirely of a small island in the Mediterranean – and open it up into something impossibly huge, something I could never hope to experience in its entirety. I had been to Antarctica, for crying out loud!
- Skills: The list of things I had learnt ran long. Scuba diving and apnoea had practically taken over my life. Yoga had become a way of living. Trekking, cycling, running, skiing, paddleboarding, kayaking. Before my twenties, the only sports I had ever properly practised were weightlifting and table tennis. And let’s not forget everything else I learnt along the way. I had become practically fluent in Spanish. I had learnt how to read weather, navigate unfamiliar terrain, find my bearings using the stars and take photographs that actually resembled what I was trying to photograph. Then there were countless other practical skills that had become so instinctive I barely even thought about them anymore. Like doing laundry in a hostel sink, you know…
- Experiences: Whether I was hanging out with dear old friends or chatting to complete strangers, I had learnt that not every adventure was best experienced alone. In fact, as much as I had grown to love my own company, I could confidently say that some of my greatest adventures had been the ones I had shared with other people. Like trekking up a mountain with the Ciudad Perdida Family or finding myself beside a bonfire with Bianca, stargazing with the Jordan Family in the middle of the desert or making love with Micah on a tropical beach, singing alongside the Salkantay Family while staring towards Machu Picchu or somehow becoming a model for some random artist I had met on Tinder. Different people, different places and very different kinds of relationships, but memories I wouldn’t have traded for anything.
Wisdom had always been the most difficult part of LAW for me to conceptualise. I had always insisted that knowledge itself wasn’t enough – what mattered was knowing how to use it. Still, you couldn’t exactly use knowledge without having any in the first place. Over the previous decade, my repertoire had expanded considerably. Or so I liked to think – mostly through:
- Medicine: The best birthday gift I could possibly have received when I turned twenty was knowing that, just a few weeks later, I would finally start studying medicine. Ever since I had decided that I wanted to become a surgeon, medicine had become my monomaniacal obsession and my life had revolved almost completely around it. Then I took a gap year and completely upended everything I had worked towards. From one existential crisis to another, I had been forced to weigh my career against my freedom. Somehow, against all expectations, I found a balance that seemed to work – emergency medicine. Much like when I had decided to become a doctor a decade earlier, I had somehow become something I never saw coming. I had reinvented myself all over again and, somehow, I seemed to be thriving.
- Travel: Travel had given me an education that I never could have received entirely from books. I had met people from all walks of life living in all kinds of places. I had witnessed their art, tasted their food and listened to their languages. I had crossed boundaries and formed connections around the world that had genuinely enriched and shaped my life. It had also allowed me to bridge the gap between the past and the present. From the ancient Romans and Greeks to the Inca and Maya, from the Nabataeans to the Egyptians, I had stood in places where ancient civilisations once thrived and connected with worlds that had previously existed only in textbooks and my imagination. At the same time, subjects I had once found unbearably boring at school suddenly became fascinating when I came face to face with the natural world. Geology, geography, meteorology, astronomy – all that supposedly boring theory suddenly came alive once I started witnessing nature in its full glory. Marine biology, in particular, had become one of my newest obsessions!
- Literature: As a self-proclaimed scholar, you could imagine my horror when I realised that I had read only a couple of dozen books by the time I turned twenty. I immediately swore that I would change that. Then I got into medicine and promptly replaced every other kind of literature with medical textbooks. Eventually, I managed to change that too. By committing myself to a minimum of twenty minutes of reading every day, I had reached the point where I was averaging around thirty books a year. Writing, on the other hand, had always been a constant in my life. I had been doing it for as long as I could remember. That said, I had taken it one step further a few years earlier when I decided to start my own blog. Apart from writing taking a far more central role in my life, I had actually managed to get a few pieces published. And while that might have been an achievement, I had to admit that my magnum opus, at least to me, remained my gap-year journal – more than 1,600 pages of my life!
Three Decades Down
If that wasn’t a good enough tribute to the past decade, I didn’t know what else would have been. My twenties had been among the worst and, without a doubt, the best years of my life. I had experienced more highs and lows than I could ever have imagined. I had dealt with life and death, gone through my own versions of heaven and hell and somehow, through all of it, come out feeling more alive than ever.
Even though I had to leave my twenties behind, I did so with a smile stretching from one side of my face to the other, knowing that those ten years would forever bear witness to a life I never imagined I would get to experience. And maybe that was the greatest comfort I could take with me into my thirties. I had already managed to build a life that I loved once. I reckoned I could do it again. So here’s to the next decade, and whatever the hell it would bring with it!
