normalizing

There are these posts floating around Instagram at the moment that say “Normalize finding the love in your 40s. Normalize discovering and chasing new dreams in your 30s. Normalize finding yourself and your purpose in your 50s.”

I’m not going to lie, I love when people share things like that. I have grown up in a world that tells me at this stage of my life I should have my crap together. I should be married - side note, apparently this equals adulthood in some peoples minds, it doesn’t. - I should have saved enough to buy a house, I should know what career I want and have a 5 year plan. I should know if I want children and should be making a plan about all that because my biological clock is ticking away.

So all of these ‘should’s’ …this word is an interesting one, it is a word I have a hard relationship with and I know other women who do as well. I actually think that there are things in life that we should do. That it is our responsibility to do. Pay our bills, be kind to others, have boundaries in our lives, treat ourselves well, look after the world we are on. However I also know in my life there are a shed-load of ‘should’s’ that I need to let go of. Check the above paragraph.

I’m 30. I’m single, have been for 9 years. I am starting life again, not 100% sure of the direction I am going in work, or life to be honest. I haven’t made plans about children, I do not have money to buy a house and I 100% do not have a 5 year plan.

How does this all link to the Instagram posts?

I think the ‘shoulds’ in culture stop those things from being normalized. If I hadn’t grown up in a culture that told me that being married at 23 (hi, evangelical christian world) then I wouldn’t battle so many doubts about being single at 30. If we were more honest about life being a journey, a constant discover of ourselves, our passions and the world surrounding us - then maybe people would be more okay with finding new dreams and purposes in their 40s and beyond.

I believe the most perfect human that ever walked the earth was Jesus. This man who when we look at his life, we only actually have substantial records for 3 years at the end of it. A man who, whatever you may believe about him, did change the face of this world. He was 30, he died at 33. We have accounts of his birth, a somewhat hilarious somewhat sassy moment when he was 12 and then nothing until he is 30.

If you believe, as I do, that He is God, then you believe he had a purpose for his life, he knew the end game. But I really truly believe that as I look at his life, he prepared himself for it. The 30 years that we have little account of, he was prepared and just living. He knew what he was walking towards and he took the time to discover himself and God along the way.

I don’t think this means we all have to know our direction from a young age, or have it sorted by 30 - prepared to transform the world. That was his journey, his story. But, this is my take-away; there is a journey that we have to walk through and often that defines who we are. The journey gets us to the place of our purpose. We do not need to rush it, or be so quick to try and find it. Discovery is part of life.

One of the most beautiful things I have noticed recently is the honesty and grit of the human stories in the bible. These people are battered from life, they make huge mistakes, they don’t always know who they are, some are super young and some have lived a long life; but they all lived their own journey. They all discovered themselves and God on their way.

This Instagram post that is going around - about normalizing achievements later in life - I see that in the Bible. Women who have children late in life, men who do 180’s on their careers, widows who start again after loosing their whole families, young men who have dreams that aren’t realised for decades. I find that comforting. These stories of life from 2000 years ago were not that different from lives now. The lies about having to achieve it all by 25 are just that, lies. It hasn’t been that way ever in history and it doesn’t need to be now.

It truly isn’t a competition of achievement, there is not a one-size-fits-all roadmap.

R/