When I hit my twenties, did I ever step back and envision what my life could (or should) look like in my thirties? Probably not. Back then, I rarely, if ever, looked past the milestone of graduating from undergrad and landing that elusive first job.
But now, I have been out of undergrad for longer than the four years it took to complete the program, which seems crazy in retrospect. Many things have changed in those six years, including moving to a new country and shifting to a different field of work. However, surprisingly, many aspects of my life have also remained the same.
There was a point in my mid-twenties when things could have taken a dark turn. I had been in my worst depressive spell yet, and my anxiety had worsened to the point where it affected my ability to focus at work. When I moved to the US, I had to rebuild my life while dealing with my mental health issues. For the longest time, I was convinced I had fallen behind all of my contemporaries and gotten into a ditch I wouldn’t be able to dig my way out of.
To be honest, on paper, things weren’t as bad as they seemed to me at that time. But for someone facing their first life crisis, it may have felt like the end of the world.
Things are definitely better now than they were back then, but if only the human mind were so easily satisfied. Like most people who find some stability after a period of uncertainty, I had only graduated to a new level of worry. I remember I used to say, “These are worries I would love to have,” but I quickly found out that these, like all other worries, are troubling all the same.
Before we delve into my experiences, I want to note that the things I discuss may not always be universally applicable to others approaching their thirties. However, I hope that reading through my thoughts helps you become more comfortable with your own worries and concerns.
Navigating the Loneliness of Adulthood
I have never been a people person, except for those four years in undergrad. That was probably due to unique circumstances: namely, going to school with the same 120 or so people for four years. University is a magical time where bonds are formed fairly quickly, and some of those even last past graduation. By my fourth year, I was active in three or four different friend groups, and I texted at least three to five people each day.
Seven years later, I am only in touch with a much smaller group of core friends, and when I say “in touch,” I mean we contact each other every few months and catch up for a few minutes. What little extroversion I had gained during university was gradually broken down by the combined effect of moving to a new country and living through a pandemic.
Sometimes, I acutely miss sharing every random detail of my life with half-a-dozen people on a daily basis. But that was never going to last, was it? While I still talk to a decent number of people on a weekly basis, I don’t have a strong bond or shared history with most of them. There’s a quiet despair that frequents my thoughts from time to time. It’s an uncomfortable reminder that when I reach out for help during dark nights of the soul, I might find nothing but silence on the other end.
To be fair, I have a handful of people whom I do indeed turn to during such moments of crisis. But the despair is there all the same, and its quietness becomes louder during those minutes spent waiting for someone to respond to my messages.
I haven’t made any new close friends since I turned twenty-five. If this trend continues, the despair might become even more unbearable and deafening as I grow older.
Balancing the Desire to Save and Splurge
I have to be honest: I rarely wanted for things during my childhood. My dad indulged more or less all my whims, regardless of our financial situation. When I moved to the US, however, I had to scale back my expenses significantly, as the cost of living is several magnitudes higher in NYC compared to Dhaka. I worked remotely for some Bangladeshi clients, but it was a drop in the ocean for someone with NYC living expenses.
I remember the first few times I explored the city and went to various superstores. There’s a Target near my then-therapist’s office, and one day I bought a 10-dollar Batman action figure from there. I didn’t have any cash notes on me, and all I had were quarter-dollar coins. As I grabbed my coin pouch and nervously counted the coins, I could feel the cashier’s exasperated stare on me as four or five people waited in line behind me. It made me want to disappear into the ground.
A master’s degree, an internship, and two jobs later, I earn a comfortable disposable income that allows me to pay the rent, cover my mother’s monthly expenses in Bangladesh, pay a dozen or so monthly subscriptions, and buy a few dozen books every month. I also started payments for the Contributor and Editorial teams at UpThrust. It’s enriching to compensate these talented people for their hard work.
However, ever since an expensive trip to Bangladesh last December, I struggle to maintain an end-of-month bank balance of 25% of my monthly salary. It’s not an ideal situation for someone who’s aiming to save up for major purchases such as a car or a top-end gaming PC in the next few years, not to mention major life milestones like buying an apartment or a house.
I already have a good idea of how I can easily cut down on my expenses. Cancel subscriptions for services I don’t use often enough. Prepare lunch for the office from home. Buy three or four books a month at most. Maybe even reduce my therapy sessions to a monthly cadence. But I don’t want to make these changes. I want to splurge a little, but it’s hard to do that and save simultaneously. New Yorkers have a way of life where they work throughout the week and spend their hard-earned money on weekends, purchases, and vacations. What’s the use of working a 40–60 hour work week in New York if you don’t get to live a little?
Still, in a time of recession and mass layoffs, an anxious person can’t help but wonder what would happen if I had to find a new job and couldn’t land one in a month or two without a safety net. Let’s hope that doesn’t come to pass.
The Never-Ending Journey of Writing Fiction
Writing fiction is one of those things that can truly ignite my passion. I started writing terrible fanfiction when I was sixteen years old and then took a break during my undergrad years. I returned to it around six years ago and began writing original fiction.
Crafting plot and character ideas, and building new worlds brick by brick (or more accurately, word by word) can be an exhilarating process. It can also be a very long process. Once I got over the initial hurdle of finishing a first draft of a novel, I realized that there was so much more work left to do. Seeking out feedback, realizing that the first draft is somewhat lacking — but then again, most first drafts are — learning how to get better, and then editing the story relentlessly. There are a few more steps, like finalizing a manuscript, seeking out agents if you want to pursue traditional publishing, or hiring editors, cover designers, and even marketers if you want to go the self-publishing route.
Personally, I have never gone past the editing step. I have finished three first drafts so far, and gotten substantial feedback for two of them. Like many novice authors, I simply move on to new stories, with the aim to come back to my old ones later with a set of fresh eyes. It’s okay to write a handful of first drafts before your first published book. Fantasy juggernaut Brandon Sanderson wrote thirteen first drafts for around ten years before he published his first book.
All that is okay, but what worries me most is how little time I get to put into writing since I joined my current job, and how I often use that as an excuse to not put any time into writing. I wrote over 160,000 words in three months during and after NaNoWriMo 2021, and a measly 10,000 words in the fourteen months since then. To be fair, I did spend a significant chunk of that time brainstorming and rebuilding the worlds where my stories take place, as well as reading writing craft books to get better at outlining stories and creating satisfying character arcs.
Yet I can’t help but feel that I am not spending as much time on writing as I could be. I have had so many ideas for stories in the last couple of years, and I want to explore as many of them as I can, even though they number in the dozens by now. But there’s that sliver of doubt in my head that tells me I am going to wake up one, ten or twenty, or even thirty years later, and realize that I didn’t utilize my best years to fulfill my dreams. And that’s terrifying.
Confronting the Inevitability of Loss
People get old. That’s a fact of life. And so is the fact that they eventually die.
My parents are getting up there in age, and both have a myriad of health issues. I have experienced my fair share of trauma, but I haven’t experienced a death in my immediate family yet. At first, it was my paternal grandfather passing away almost twenty years ago, and then I lost a couple of uncles and aunts. I lost a friend from school to a car accident a few years ago. It’s surreal thinking I won’t be seeing pictures of him getting married or having children as I do with all of my other school friends.
Even the prospect of losing my pet is mortifying. I was talking with my dad about how our cat is getting older (she’s six years old now) and that we should prepare for health complications. She will start getting sick, and at one point, she won’t get better again. She will keep getting worse and worse until it will be time to put her down. And then the house will feel emptier. We’ll find her hair on our beds and furniture, but she won’t be there anymore.
In this context, life feels like a game of musical chairs. People will keep dropping out of the game until it’s your time to say goodbye. Like the average person, I don’t feel like I might be dying anytime soon, but at thirty years old, it’s not like I can say I didn’t get a fair shake at life by now.
As someone hovering between agnosticism and atheism, I am not sure what awaits me after death, but neither prospects seem good, given that I haven’t really tried that hard in getting into the good place. I just hope that the people I love don’t suffer after they die.
Navigating the Complex World of Dating and Marriage
I will be honest: I am terrible when it comes to dating. I only really tried it late into my undergrad years, and those forays didn’t turn out so great. I had a lot on my plate the first couple of years after I moved to the US, so I didn’t dabble in dating that much. And then, when things were finally back to some semblance of normalcy, my dating muscle had atrophied so much that I didn’t bother with it for the next few years.
So that’s how I ended up with no dating experience for the last six years. And that would be fine if it weren’t for the fact that I still keenly feel the absence of a meaningful connection. I haven’t shared my deepest fears and wildest dreams with anyone for a while, and I miss that feeling of trust and acceptance that comes from someone who has shared those vulnerable parts of themselves with you.
I am at that age where Bangladeshi women my age are either long married or not interested in relationships at the moment. And I am far enough in age from women in their early twenties that exploring companionship becomes awkward. It’s a different dynamic for non-Bangladeshi women in New York, but I haven’t had much success in that area either.
I did say yes to my parents when they asked if they should look for potential matches for an arranged marriage, but lately, I have been wondering if that was the best move. Just because I am interested in a relationship doesn’t mean I am ready for (or even want) a marriage right now. I don’t even know what I am looking for in a relationship and a partner at the moment, or even what my love language is. I am not necessarily against marriage in the near future, but my anxious brain keeps pulling all the negatives. A marriage isn’t broken as conveniently as a relationship, and I have heard about (and have seen) my fair share of unhappy marriages.
It feels like I missed exploring dating and relationships in the prime of my youth, and now all that’s left is settling down for the compromise of marriage and getting into all these commitments, such as having children, that will make it even harder for me to pursue my dreams. Having children can be a wonderful experience, but I am not sure I want to experience that in the next five years.
Every now and then, I have thoughts that feel thoroughly alien from my mind’s rubric. What would a home shared with a partner look like? Would the two of us accept each other for who we are, or try to change each other? What’s alone time going to look like post-marriage? Are we going to get stuck in a rut where our eventual child grows up within Bangladeshi values that are non-compatible with broader American society and just becomes another second-generation Bangladeshi American with only Bangladeshi friends and no real exposure to the vast mix of cultures in America?
Are we going to be able to save enough money? As someone who has experienced significant financial changes throughout my childhood and adolescence, I want to build a nest egg that helps me and my immediate family live comfortably without any extravagant expenses. Can we achieve that as partners, especially if we bring the cost addition of a child into the mix?
I am sure I’ll have a lot more questions, and I hope I get good answers in the event I decide to settle down with someone.
Battling Insecurities and FOMO
Therapy has helped me make substantial progress in knowing myself and understanding my thoughts and emotions. Yet, every time I see or hear someone laughing or giggling surreptitiously around me, I can’t help but feel that they are laughing at me.
I don’t know if it’s childhood trauma, young adult trauma, or just the garden-variety brown upbringing that instilled these insecurities in me. It’s hard to articulate what they are because a lot of them only pop up in very specific moments and die down just as randomly. Nevertheless, let’s give it a try.
Let’s talk about the constant comparison with other people. This probably has something to do with pre-2018 me feeling like I have to be ‘useful’ and provide ‘value’ to be loved. I think I have grown past that, but every now and then, I see something on my social feeds that makes me compare myself to my peers in a negative way. It could be something as small as a photo of some of my friends having dinner a few thousand miles away on another continent, or a post about someone getting into a top business school. One look at that post, and I spend the next five minutes wondering about the paths not taken.
I had a lot of ambitions heading into the final year of my undergrad program. I worked hard on building my resume and getting part-time and internship experience, as well as working at and on startups. However, I was too high on momentum and energy to step back for a second and think about what my goals were, and build a plan towards achieving them. I had a burgeoning network in the startup industry but was aiming for a job at a telco company. Not only did I not connect with people working in that company or the industry, but I also didn’t do any research on the type of jobs in the company available to fresh or recent graduates.
I wasn’t even sure that I would like to work in that industry. It was just something I wanted, and I wanted that first bullet for full-time roles in my resume to be special and meaningful.
Unfortunately, I dealt with a spate of personal crises near the end of my final year, some of them of my own making. I got two different jobs in the span of six months, and even though I worked especially hard in my second role, I had a hard time performing according to my high standards, as my anxiety was steadily becoming worse over time.
Eventually, my dad convinced me to move to the US to get a fresh start. A few weeks later, I learned that the telco company I had wanted to work for had finally started recruiting for entry-level trainee positions again. I remember going to that link on the website and going through the forms, wrestling between submitting an application vs staying the course and going to the US. In the end, I was too exhausted to take the risk of changing course and didn’t apply for the role.
One year later, I had been in the US for a while and was sitting for my first GRE exam. I didn’t get the results that I had expected. I resolved to give the exam another try. However, fate intervened, and I reached a personal nadir in terms of my emotional and mental well-being. I was too exhausted and frightened to take another swing at the GRE, and it would be too late to take the test again by the time I recovered. So I only applied to one grad school, the one I thought I had some chance of getting in. And thankfully, I got in!
I scaled my ambitions down as my priorities changed, and I shifted my focus towards a field that I was actively interested in so that I could get a job that I liked doing while also working on my side projects. However, the mind is irrational, and all it can come up with when it sees things I wanted years ago, is that I wanted them and I didn’t get them. It’s not even considering whether getting those things would be good for me in the long run.
Hopefully, I can work through these issues as I get older. I have other insecurities to deal with as it is.
Embracing my Blessings
Now, just because I spent some three thousand words ruminating on my current concerns, it doesn’t mean that I’m not aware of my blessings.
For instance, I got to build a blog, UpThrust, from scratch and work with dozens of talented individuals as we published over 750 articles over the last five years. UpThrust helped me keep focus at a time in my life when everything else seemed nebulous and uncertain, and I will always be grateful for that.
I have been building a book collection from scratch as well. I started out with $1 dollar books from the bargain bins at the Strand, and now there are four different bookshelves and a wall shelf at our place. Going to a bookstore after work and making an impulse purchase always gives me a hit of that sweet, sweet dopamine, as does fetching Amazon packages from our porch and opening them up to see new books sitting between air pillows.
I am still in touch with great friends and well-wishers who either live far away or are super busy with work, but they make time for me whenever I want to do a call out of the blue and discuss my latest concerns. It’s been great watching them grow and mature with new circumstances and embrace new challenges, and catching up with them can halt time for a while and make me appreciate the beauty of these friendships.
I am very lucky to have been able to migrate to the US and set up a life here. Therapy, at the very least, wouldn’t have been as easy back home. It’s been great being able to explore who I want to be. And let’s not forget the sheer convenience (and joy) of Amazon Prime’s next-day shipping.
Things are probably going to be very different when I come back to this topic ten years later, but hopefully, some important things will still be the same. Will the insecurities be still there? Probably, in some shape or form. Hopefully, by then I will be wiser, kinder, closer to my long-term goals, and of course, a bit happier.