Introducing Growing Good

It's my birthday! I'm launching a newsletter!

Oreo ice cream cake for my 8th birthday

Welcome to my newsletter, Growing Good.

I am writing to you from my desk in my bedroom. From my window, I can see a bright green tree whose leaves are holding onto the rain from the night before. We live on a busy street — on a bus route I used to take to a bakery at four in the morning to load loaves of sourdough bread into two ovens. Below my window is a lilac tree that has already bloomed and gone, and two doors down is a fig tree, its fruit still small and ripening. On the end of the block is the house my Mom lived in when she was 23. It’s a big stone house with a circular tower and she tells stories of a piano room with floor-to-ceiling wood paneling where she and her roommates would gather to play music. I often try to peer in the windows, looking for that room, but no one is ever home. 

I am turning 30 on this block and people tell me it is an important birthday. They say your 30s are better than your 20s, and I am inclined to believe them. Most of my friends are turning 30 this year, and we have been discussing what it means. I turned to the internet for guidance, curious what my essay-writing peers might have to say about the birthday, but I mostly found listicles with “30 lessons I learned before 30” and articles about the pressures of aging as a woman and the horrors of sagging skin. I am less worried about sagging skin — though I diligently apply retinol every other night to ward off any signs of it — and more about the perceived permanence the age brings. The next zero after 30 is 40. I can no longer pretend my time is limitless. 

When I was about to move to New York after college, I asked my professor if I was making a mistake. “The great thing about your 20s,” she said, “is that no choice is permanent. If you hate it, you can leave.” I moved to New York and didn’t hate it, but I still said this phrase to myself like a mantra when faced with the paralyzing suite of choices before me. 

My first year out of college felt like a bad episode of HBO’s Girls: I got mono, then bed bugs, and then fired from my job at a barre studio visited by rich moms in Cobble Hill. One month later, Trump was elected President, and the next day I went to my new job at a yoga studio in SoHo that exclusively played hip-hop during its candle-lit classes. I went to auditions for roles in big fancy Broadway shows, and when I got close to getting them, I was told this was exciting. My friend broke up with her boyfriend, I fell in love with someone and then we broke up too, and every night I met my friends at a bar to drink beer and talk about who or what we wanted to become. I wrote in my journal, “I wonder what this all adds up to.”

I spent most of my 20s feeling scared — scared I would never find a partner or make enough money. Scared I was wasting time and falling behind. Scared that the thing I had always been told I was good at — singing — was not the thing that was making me happy. Every choice felt thorny. What if it was the wrong one?  

In an essay about the birth of her child and subsequent divorce, Leslie Jamison writes, “Being an adult meant watching many possible versions of yourself whittle into just one.” The paralyzing possibilities of my 20s have been chipped away, and I am left with a more defined version of myself than the putty I started with. I left New York and moved to Philly. I stopped auditioning and started writing. I put 40k in loans into graduate school to become a therapist and fell in love with my roommate. This version may not be set in stone, but it’s defined nonetheless. 

When I moved back to Philly, I told myself it was temporary. “I’m here for now,” I’d say, “Who knows if I’ll stay.” But as I enter my 30s, I no longer want to hide behind the temporary — the forever possibility that I might change my mind. I want to own the life I am building. I have decided what I want my life to look like, and though it looks nothing like I thought it would when I was 22, it is mine. 

I live in an apartment in Philly with my partner and our two cats, and we are a fifteen-minute walk from my brother and sister-in-law. When we moved in, we painted our bedroom blue, a shade my friend Jessie helped us mix at the Sherwin-Williams around the corner. In the backyard, we’ve built raised garden beds and planted perennials — flowers that will come back year after year. Above my desk, I’ve stuck a poem by Raymond Carver into the wall with a push pin. In it, he describes his boat and the trip he will take with his friends. He writes, “We’ll go out into the sunny harbor and have fun, that’s the idea…Not thinking about this or that or getting ahead or falling behind. The idea is simply to enjoy ourselves and not get scared.” 

I am still scared of many things. I am scared to put out this newsletter. I am worried I am too late, that there are already enough voices on the internet, and my Mom will be the only one who reads it. But then I know I need to get over myself. If my Mom is the only person who reads this, so be it. The idea is simply to enjoy myself and not get scared.

My life will change again, I know. People die and break up and change their minds. But for now, I can take comfort that my life is here, in Philadelphia on my block where the lilac blooms each spring and my mother was once 23. I will use the chamomile in our backyard to decorate my birthday cake, and the friends I met at 18 are coming over to celebrate me at 30. I’m still not sure what this all adds up to — maybe I’ll never know — but for once, I feel happy where I am, here in my blue room on a busy street. 

Thank you for reading the first installment of my newsletter, Growing Good. It will be published once per month for now, though this may increase as I get my footing. This newsletter will be about entering my 30s, but it will also include less existential topics like books I like (or hate), becoming a therapist, and (hopefully) interviews with people I love and respect. Growing Good is free to read and I hope you will subscribe — it would mean the world to me!

The title of the newsletter is based on a quote from one of my favorite books, Middlemarch by George Eliot: “For the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” 

George Eliot on Dorothea, IYKYK