Sounds like I’m not the only person for whom the 00s have been a big decade! Thank you for sharing your stories with me.

As I’d mentioned, my understanding of adult development is heavily influenced by the work of Daniel Levinson — you can get the Cliffs’ Notes version of his theory here. (All the language refers to men, and his original study was on the male lifespan; he did wind up writing a second book about women, but if there were any major differences, I would have remembered them, and I don’t. Studying adult development is hard because the specifics of everyone’s life differ, but the people who have done it successfully, like Levinson and Dan McAdams, focus on general themes. Maybe “becoming a grownup” to you means running your own business, or having a baby, or buying your first real car, or doing your first jail stint, but everyone wants to do something in their late teens/early 20s to prove their adulthood, for example.)

And it sounds like a bunch of you all are coming up on the Age 30 Transition, or have recently gone through it. This is a really helpful concept to understand, especially if you’re within five years of 30.

One of the major things I loved about Sassy Curmudgeon‘s “Ten Years of Twenties” post is her acknowledgment of the dark side of the 20s:

When I was 22, a 28 year-old friend of mine sat me down and gave it to me straight. “The next four to five years are going to suck,” she said. “But then it gets awesome.” I smiled and nodded and truly believed that life would not suck for me, because I was starry-eyed and ambitious and different, and she was fucking old anyway, so what did she know? She was right, of course. Being 22 through 27 just kind of blows. It’s not a constant state of blowing, though—it’s like a fine wine; the blow ripens over time until you get a nice, full-bodied suck.

This is why the Age 30 Transition needs to happen. The media give one’s 20s great play as a time of dating, urban adventures, maximum good looks and minimum responsibility, but the fact is, that’s not how most of us experience it. For most of us, it’s a hard time: a time of piecing together the scraps of adult life from whatever’s nearest, all the while not fully knowing yourself well enough to know what you really need from and can contribute to a relationship, a career, a community. It’s a mad scramble for jobs that aren’t too demeaning, dates that aren’t too depressing, used furniture that looks more “shabby chic” than “trailer park panache,” and trying to find something affordable at H&M that can get you through a job interview.

As you near your 30s, you’ve got a little ground under your feet and can start to make some decisions. Maybe that job you took right after graduation because you had to have a job isn’t the right one for you, and law programs have been looking surprisingly tempting. Maybe that job you took is turning out to be a real career, after all, and you’re thinking about moving away from your home town to go work at headquarters. You start realizing what works for you and what doesn’t, and you’ve begun to develop the experience, financial resources, and general life savvy to get what you want. (Among my group of friends, we referred to this time as “Everyone who’s married gets divorced, everyone who’s single gets married, everyone in grad school drops out, everyone in the workforce goes to grad school.”)

So for those of you still doing the patchwork-quilting of the 20s, hang in there. And those of you starting to lift up your heads and say, “Hey, wait, why am I working at/dating/living in X when I’m really a totally Y kind of person?” — fasten your seatbelts. It may be a bumpy ride for a year or two … but it’s worth it.