Bucket List

This weekend I cam up with a bucket list for my thirtieth birthday, which is a little less than two years and two months away.

I know the age of 30 does not equal death, so a "bucket list" might seem a little overdramatic, but I've been thinking more and more about where I am in life right now versus where I wanted to be in life by now. Again, probably stupid, but I just can't help it. When I imagined myself at 27, I had elaborate fantasies of what I would be. A wife, a published author, working with kids or maybe even staying home with my own child. I read a quote once that said the act of growing up was the slow giving up of all the dreams you had as a child. Really sad, but as I sit as an adult woman, I start to realize how much this applies to me. What do I have? A job I am invested in but not really too passionate about. No husband, no book, no baby. While I have so much that compensates (wonderful friends, two really adorable cats, and all the things I am always so grateful for--family, basic health, a roof over my head, etc), it is a hard pill for me to swallow that I have not achieved what I always just assumed I would have--and what I still really, almost desperately, still want to have made for myself.

Some of this lack of achievement is due to luck or fate or whatever (which is another post I have percolating in my head), and part of it rests solely on me. I haven't tried hard enough, I've been too easily defeated, I haven't dared when I should have, blah blah blah and yada yada yada. You don't really want to read a narrative of my WHOLE psyche. But I'm tired of it. I'm getting too old to not be getting what I want. What I've always wanted.

So here is my bucket list. I'm an OT, and for each of these long-term goals there are multiple short-term steps, but I'll spare you all those gory details. But the two main ones are: by the time I am thirty, I will have had a work of fiction published, and I will be in a committed romantic relationship. Not too much to ask, right? Not unless you consider how spectacularly I've failed at these things before.

There are other things with which I haven't been quite as unsuccessful at achieving. I want to be in good shape, I want to maintain my friendships and have nurtured others, I want to have saved up enough money to have bought a car or a condo or something equally adult-y, I want to be working in an area of OT I am actually passionate about.

There it is. out in the universe, which I ask to hold me accountable. A 30 year old bucket list. And I will certainly keep you updated as to which items I cross off!!