where's the fun in normal

Right up until I was 29 years 8 months and 14 days old I thought turning 30 was no big deal.

Then I noticed that I was preempting the question. You know. That question.

“Ho are you feeling about the big three 0?”

I’d starting answering this before the other person had even finished asking. I’d pull a bland adjective out of thin air – fine, good, great – and deliver it with breezy unconcern.

Then I’d let it sit there.

The other person would usually pause, waiting for me to fill the silence with bright protestations about how I really am fine about the fact that I’m turning thirty and still single, with no prospects of popping out babies any time soon, and how it’s all been worth it because I love my job and I wouldn’t trade all the experiences I’ve had in the last ten years for anything. All of this might be true, but I don’t like being expected to say it. And when I don’t oblige with the culturally correct dialogue, the conversation usually moves on.

The day I turned 29 years 8 months and 14 days old, however, the conversation didn’t move on. I looked up to notice that the person who had just asked me the question was starring at me with rather more puzzlement than I thought the answer warranted.

“What?” I said.

“Fine?” she repeated.

“Uh huh.”

“I ask you how you’re feeling about the situation in Somalia and all you have to say is fine?” she said.

Oh.

That was when I started to get annoyed. I didn’t want to be one of those people who have a crisis about turning 30. It’s just so… normal.

Over the last couple of months I’ve tried hard to understand what’s freaking me out. It is possible that I am actually subconsciously worried about the ticking of my biological clock. But I really don’t think this is the major problem. When I look at other people’s children, no matter how cute, I usually just feel relieved that they’re not mine. The fact that I’m not in kiddie-headspace right now was only underscored by a conversation I had last week with my boss’ wife.

“Oh, little Will’s getting over his first bad cold,” she said, exhausted, when I asked her how the kids were. “He’s not really sick anymore, just miserable. He’s been hanging off my leg, whining, wanting to be held all the time and I just can’t get anything done.”

“Gee,” I said, “That must make you want to bend down and tell him, ‘Get used to it buddy, that’s life, deal with it. You’re going to feel bad sometimes and people just can’t put their lives on hold to pay attention to you every time you’re grumpy.’”

“Ummm, no,” she said, clearly making a mental note never to ask me to babysit. “It makes me want to pick him up and comfort him.”

OK, I thought, so if the root of my present angst isn’t children perhaps I’m starting to fret about the fact that I might die alone in my sleep at the age of 92 with no one by my side? I admit this vision does cross my mind occasionally, but so does a vision of being killed at 32 during a carjacking in Nairobi. Dying alone at 92 doesn’t even come close to making my “top ten worst things that could happen to me in life” list.

Maybe it is just the mathematics of it all. Math has never been my strong point, but even I’m smart enough to figure out that using conventional reasoning and the most favorable of equations I’m approaching the “33% of life” mark. However, I would venture that time doesn’t count unless you can remember it, and this changes the numbers in the equation significantly. For starters, I can’t remember much from years 1-10, so I’m really only 20 (and before any child psychologists freak out, I’m pretty sure the patchy memories are a result of living in five different houses in four different countries during that time rather than any childhood abuse I’ve repressed). Of those 20 years I’ve spent roughly 7 asleep. In “real time” I’m only just turning 13. But even as I calculated it out I knew this wasn’t it either. I’m not really the type to stare at an hourglass, fascinated by the trickling sand. Well, not for long, anyway.

I didn’t put my finger on it until yesterday. Someone asked me what I’d been doing in Kenya last year, and I talked about leading a workshop series for counselors and pastors from Kenya, South Africa, and Rwanda, on trauma and humanitarian work.

They did a double take.

“How old are you?”

As I said 29 it hit me.

I won’t get asked that for much longer. I will soon lose the double-take factor because, as I turn 30, I’m losing my child prodigy status.

OK, before you write me off as a complete narcissist, let me explain.

I was never much of a child prodigy as a child. In fact, I probably didn’t even rate as normal. I did get my photo in the paper once when I was five, but only because I was reading a Babar the Elephant book wearing a set of headphones almost as big as my thick-lens glasses. I was sitting on the floor of the library with one leg twisted awkwardly underneath me, a perfect illustration for the article they were writing on special needs children. This was somewhat of a recurring theme in my early years – my school had me tested for learning disabilities when I was 11, and I was 13 before we moved for the 5th time in my life and I managed to make my first real friend.

Perhaps just by virtue of contrast I sort of feel that I earned some late-bloomer-child-prodigy-status during my twenties. I’ve made friends, and kept them, across seven moves in four different countries. I’ve picked up three degrees. I’ve driven a police boat underneath the Sydney Harbor Bridge, slept in a tent in the Masai Mara, and volunteered in a slum in Manila. I’ve written a novel. I’ve traveled the world teaching about trauma and stress management. I’ve been, largely, happy.

We define who we are at least partly through comparing ourselves to others, and wherever I’ve lived over the years I’ve always been somewhat “different” – in accent, in color, in language, in career. By my late teens I’d learned to turn being different to my advantage in most situations. But, I’ve recently realized that being different, and being seen to be different, has become an important part of my identity in its own right. Now that I’m turning 30 I’m finding that I’m less worried about not having achieved the milestones of marriage and children than I am about the fact that people are going to start expecting me to be capable, knowledgeable and accomplished as I travel the world. The fact that I (sometimes) am all of this will no longer be surprising and noteworthy. It will be normal. And where’s the fun in normal?

I’m a firm believer in fun being more something you make than something you have, so finding some good answers to that question is one of the challenges I will carry with me into the decade ahead.

Along the way I’d also like to shake my fear that normal equals boring, and that boring is a fate worse than death. I aim to check my instinct to take a different path long enough to ask myself whether there are good reasons to take it, apart from the fact that it’s different. And I will continue to struggle to outgrow my habitual tendency to judge my life through the prism of other’s perceptions. It’s not that I think other people’s perceptions shouldn’t matter. It’s more that they shouldn’t matter quite so much.

Before I turn 40 I also want to… huh…ummm…. swim with dolphins, raft down the Amazon, and fulfill one of my most cherished ambitions – to eat ice cream on every continent in the world.

Right then, I’m clearly fresh out of deep and meaningful commentary for now. Since it’s Friday night here I might just have to settle for going out and finding some fun.

Huh – now doesn’t that just sound… normal. It seems I’m already making prodigious progress! As a reward, perhaps now’s a good time to book a trip to Antarctica later this year for me, Ben, and Jerry.

Let me know if you want in on the action.

It’s bound to be fun.

where’s the fun in normal?