What I Know Now That I Wish I'd Known at 30

I turned forty this year, and the person I keep thinking about is not the one I am now. It is the woman I was at thirty.

She had no idea what the next ten years were going to ask of her. A hospital. More than two years of studying eight to twelve hours a day, back in my hometown, trying to understand what had happened. Starting over in Bangkok at thirty-five. If someone had shown her that list, I’m not sure she would have believed it was the same life.

People like to ask what you would tell your younger self. I have thought about it more than I expected to, and the honest answer is that most of what I know now, she couldn’t have heard. Some things only arrive by living through their opposite.

But there are a few things I would still want to sit next to her and say.

The first is about people. At thirty she wanted breadth: more friends, more rooms where people knew her name. Somewhere in that decade, it turned around. What matters to me now is a few people who know the unedited version and stay anyway. Friendships that can hold a difficult conversation without breaking. It is a much smaller circle. And a much easier one to belong to.

The second is about love. If I could hand her one thought, it would be this: be careful what you ask a person to fill.

When someone becomes the thing that holds you up, every shift in their mood turns into your emergency. Every bit of distance starts to read like a verdict on you. From the inside, that can feel exactly like love. It is closer to dependence, and the two are very easy to mistake for each other.

What I would want for her instead is someone walking beside her, not someone she has to lean her whole weight on. Someone who adds to a life that is already hers, rather than someone she needs in order to have one. It took most of a decade to understand that difference. I don’t think it could have been learned any faster.

The last thing is the one I learned last, and it changed the most.

Forgiveness.

Not the formal kind. The daily kind.

Forgiving her for the people she walked away from too quickly.

For the choices she made with what she knew at the time, and then judged herself for later, as if she should have known with knowledge she didn’t have yet.

She was doing her best. She was brave in the ways she knew how to be brave, and afraid in ways that made sense given everything before her. She needed more gentleness than I gave her then.

I am giving it to her now, from here, at forty.

This is KC — from Love & Life. 💜