rebness

Thirty hit me hard, too -- I hadn't ever really imagined myself as An Adult, and thirty just seems like such an incontrovertibly grown-up number that I found it really hard to wrap my head around it. But now that I'm 11 months deep into this first year of my thirties, I can tell you that nothing essential changes, except for good stuff, that is. I found, as others have commented, an easier, quieter sense of confidence and a clearer sense of myself, who I am as a person, and what matters to me. This had a lot to do, also, with the fact that I became a mother and a wife in very short order during my later 20s, and I think that those events tend to realign one's perspective; for me, that realignment was just solidifying as I hit thirty, so the events combined to mark a sort of phase-shift in my outlook on the world and my view of myself.

I can't pull all-nighters like I used to and a lot of my too-wild excesses have tapered off, but aside from those changes I honestly feel like I'm more truly myself now than I ever was during my twenties, and that really isn't such a bad feeling to have after all. :)