29 Is the Best Year of Your Life, or Is It? Few Things I Learned

Is 29 the most exciting time in a woman’s life, wonders the writer, Shalaka Patil.

A couple of years ago, New York Magazine released an essay which quoted a research study claiming that 29 is the best age of your life. Everyone apparently likes you at this age and you have an average of 80 friends. As a 29-year-old soon to cross over to the dark side, what I can say with a fair degree of certainty is that if nothing else, 29 is the age of uncertainty.

At 29, you are perhaps as put together or comely or responsible or immature as ever. Yet, you tend to weigh the impact of your statements and shenanigans from the sombre lens of a 30-year-old.

There is a degree of presumed gravitas attached to this upcoming decade. You don’t want to be caught doing something stupid that ill-behooves your age, such as, for instance, still temping and unsure of when you will find a permanent day’s work, or going to a bowling alley with people of the age group that know the names of the current and ex members of One Direction.

I think largely though, it’s an age where you will take stock of your life and wonder if you have hit all the requisite goal posts that make for a ‘successful’ life. This thought tends to precipitate wild panic because you are bound to realise that your life, in fact, is in as much disarray in some areas as it was when you were, say 24 or 27.

You, perhaps, have a slightly senior position at work and having done what you do for a few years now, have developed a degree of confidence and facility in your chosen craft. There you are, at a conference handing out your cards with flourish or with a client thinking through their complex problems with practiced ease.

Yet you repeat the exact same crash and burn pattern when it comes to dealing with other areas, like the interactions with your parents or the people you date.

One thing that you will notice consistently as soon as you turn 29 is that nobody is going to let you forget that you are about to turn 30 in just a year.

‘People Are Looking for Similarities to Reach Out’

Over the last few years, I learned to engage with people who looked different from me and who had grown up in completely different worlds. 

I learned it was never sensible to put people in boxes. Through my travels I gathered that people were always looking to find connections and similarities to reach out. I learned that you could find a best friend in a person that knew nothing about Dnyaneshwar and Delhi Durbar.

This forced me to look outside of my immediate anxieties and complexes because really, no one notices your flaws that much, they are eager to find the nice parts. It took all of my 20s to learn this lesson.

There is a tendency, in India especially, to make you feel like you missed the bus if you failed to meet the marriage milestone by 30. This mass social anxiety towards seeing you, as a woman, married off will amplify with every passing day.

There will be people who will remind you of your gender and make you feel like your utility is diminishing. And I have to admit, if I am to write this with any degree of honesty, that it bothers me to no end. I take heart in the fact that I am not alone and that women far more accomplished like Sania Mirza and Jennifer Aniston have faced their share of sexist questions too.

There is no one clear solution to this because as a woman, this is a shifting goal post and today’s question will be replaced by a new one. So you will never reach a point where you’re meeting everyone’s approval. I am, however, always ably guided by a dear friend’s advice that there is no right age to do something, there’s just a right time to do it.

And that right time is when you’re ready. Every stand I take, whether political or about my personal life choices, will invite some detractors. The trick is, even in the din of all those onerous views, not to forget about your autonomy. At the end of 29, this rings truer than ever.

The Different Version of ‘Me’

I find myself looking back, at the cusp of 30, imagining different versions of my life and wondering how things would have turned out. Perhaps a version in which I never left India, married at 26 or had a kid at 28.

Another version which believed in right-wing ideologies, who never read and yet felt entitled to vociferous and earnest opinions. Another version who never understood that the only way was to champion feminism (albeit my own brand) as a member of the affected class. Another version who was driven only by success at work, sitting not-so-pretty at an office desk in a foreign country, living from one lost weekend to another.

And yet the version that I am living today, surefooted in some respects, stumbling in others, still whole though, is the only one I could have ever been. And to know that is the only certainty of this age.

(Shalaka is a lawyer who works in a large law firm in Mumbai. She takes a keen interest in constitutional and policy issues. Views expressed are personal. This is a personal blog and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same)