An Autonomous Path Forward

The gift of my twenties

I turn 30 on Saturday and have been thinking about the past decade. As a history major, I love context so I turned to some history. I recently read Young and Restless: The Girls Who Sparked America's Revolutions by Mattie Kahn. It’s a great book, touching on many famous girls you’ve heard of and many more you haven’t, from the mills of Lowell, Massachusetts to the suffrage moment to the civil rights movement to the climate crisis of today. She write about how hard it is for girls with a message and a mission to grow into women—for such a long time (arguably still) there wasn’t a place for their leadership, anger and passion especially with the pressures to marry and have children (still an issue). I recommend reading it and would read a volume two in a second.

One thing that struck me was how recent the concepts of girlhood and adolescence are. It’s only been a few generations since women could pursue careers on semi equal footing (the wage gap is obviously still a thing, especially for women of color), control their money and control their bodies (obviously that one is not in a good place right now). There’s still so much work to be done but one feeling I’ve had as I turn thirty is intense gratitude for this time which I know previous generations did not have. Getting to take risks in my career and personal life in my twenties, like pivoting careers from nonprofits to writing and now to PR and talking to that cute guy at the bar in 2018 (hi Dale), was possible because of the work of so many people before me and because I don’t have dependents or debt, which are extraordinary privileges.

Here’s a passage from the book about imagining the future: