It started about two months ago. I gave my birth date to someone over the phone and she immediately paused for dramatics. “Oooh,” she said, “not too long before you’ll be the big three o.”
She said it like that, too, “three o.” Not “three, zero” or “thirty.” But two giant syllables, with space in the middle for all the emphasis and implication in the world.

“Yup,” I said, “anyway, about that appointment.”

This has continued to happen way more than I care to think about as the weeks approaching the big “three o” fall away. I’m a little shocked at how many strangers make the connection and they the declaration. It’s always “big.” It always feels way more important than I feel. And even though I know it’ll come and go, and I’ll be 30 instead of 29 and not feel any differently, I do have to admit that it’s unnerving me. A lot.

There’s no non-humiliating way to say this, so I’ll just say it: I haven’t done anything conventionally “right” or “successful” with my life. I’m so far from having a career, getting married, and having kids it’s laughable. I don’t even have a couch. I can’t afford a couch. A couch is literally too big of a financial commitment for me.

And honestly, I don’t want a couch, and I don’t know if I want the other stuff either. Whether I want it or not isn’t even relevant. It’s that I’m “EXPECTED” to have it already. My peers are busy buying houses, hunkering in, having babies. Whereas I’m feeling embarrassed and slightly ashamed when my parents send me my rent check every month. Sometimes I feel like I’ve disappointed them, like I’ve disappointed everyone who believed in me when I was 6 and gobbling down knowledge like it was better than cookie dough, which was the best. But, maybe I haven’t disappointed anyone but myself.

The other day I told my friend Arlie, “I don’t have any career goals except that I’m poor and need money. I’m doing the writing thing, but that only makes me happy.”

I didn’t even realize how I’d put my happiness in an “only” category, below my “success” and “career goals” until he pointed out that I had. Apparently, even though in my soul I believe that happiness is important, my brain has been convinced that success is better. That conventional is better. That I’ll get rewarded if I do what I should because it’s better. To all this I KNOW, I should know better.

As I’ve been thinking about this over the last few months, I’ve remembered feeling the exact same way when I turned 16. I felt (and wrote at length and with great drama) that life was passing me by, that I was sitting around waiting for it to begin. At the time, my friends were doing things like dating and driving. I felt (again, dramatically) very left behind and very unaccomplished.

I never got to drive, but I did figure out the dating thing eventually. (Ok, maybe “figure out” is a stretch. Let’s just say I muddle through as best I can.) And yet, I’m still here, feeling like a straggler, like I’m schlepping behind everyone else. When I was 25, I thought I’d have it all figured out by the time I was 30. Or, I’d at least have paid off my college credit card.

Maybe by the time I’m 35?

I don’t really “dream big.” I don’t want to be famous or anything. I don’t want “the best” this or “the most perfect” that. What I do want is to be able to stroll a farmers’ market all by myself, for as long and leisurely as I want.

I admit I’ve been drinking the farmers’ market (locally roasted) coffee for years now. I am on board with crunchy, heirloom-varieted locavorism. If it were convenient, I would be at the market every week chatting up all the produce vendors with provocatively sexy questions like, “What type of irrigation system do you use on your delicious Sun Gold tomatoes?” Every time I go to the market, I frolic in a happy, (boarding on giddy) haze of salsa samples and ukelele music and popsicles. (There better be popsicles.) And everything I eat (including the sticky-sweet-crunchy-still-warm kettle corn) is “healthy” because someone made it with their own tireless hands.

The only thing that dampens my enthusiasm is that I can’t just show up. I have to coordinate. I have to have a “market buddy.” Procuring a market buddy (especially if one is difficult to procure), can sometimes take the whimsy out of my sails. If I do manage to procure a buddy, I seem to turn into the world’s worst nag.
Buddy: (as we stroll leisurely): “And let’s see, there’s bread at this place.” (buddy keeps walking)
Me: “Wait wait wait wait. What bread?”
Buddy: “Oh, you know, white, wheat. There were some baguettes maybe. Sourdough?”
Me: “Well we have to go back and look.”
Then, I am ashamed to say, I proceed to make everyone miserable by wanting to know every last option ever offered at a farmers’ market bread stall. Ever.

I am this way with jam. I am this way with salsa. I am this way with pickles, produce, popsicles, pie, and possibilities. I want them all. I want to mull over everything. I want the leisure and the space to look and look and look and ponder, and even go home if that’s all my ponderings get for a day.

When I have a buddy, through (mostly) no fault of the buddy, I can’t do that as much. It gets crowded. People want to have an agenda, get it done, and leave. I want to have no agenda and just see what the weekly offerings inspire me to want to cook. I want to stay for hours. I want to buy all my things, and then maybe an omelette and iced coffee and sit in the sun and read or listen to people or both. I want to get so comfortable that I take off my shoes.

And when I’m done, I want to get up and buy the last, tiny leftover bouquet from a flower vendor with the change in my pocket and walk the mile home with my bags and my dog. On my own terms. Having never wasted or hurried a moment.

For several years after I moved to Minneapolis, I’d be out with friends, native Minnesotans who seemed to know everybody. Their high school track coach, their mom’s high school track coach, their uncle’s neighbor’s hair stylist. I found it profoundly annoying, if I’m being honest. There does seem to be something inherently braggy in Minnesotans (and maybe in all of us) that gets a particular pleasure from knowing everyone.

Something happened, though, about five years into my Minneapolis stint. I started knowing people, too. I’d run into a college professor at the mall, where they were clearly not supposed to be because professors should always be professing. Or, eventually I’d go to a coffee shop enough that the barista wanted to remember my name. When I started running into exes while with my current loves, I knew I’d officially made it into awkward Minnesotan know-them-all territory.

Here, I pretty much don’t know anyone. I haven’t claimed a coffee shop yet, (too many new ones to try!), and I don’t have any exes. So yesterday, when I was walking down the “main drag” of my neighborhood, I paid little attention to the person yelling my name from across the street. I figured it was a different “Lauren.” No one knows me here, not even my neighbors really know me, because many of us are in our 20’s and antisocial if it’s not via a computer. But the yelling persisted, and I finally (reluctantly, antisocially) slowed down.

She was a writing classmate, a person from school, but also someone I’d had coffee with outside of school, so I think she counts as a friend. She doesn’t live in my neighborhood, so seeing her was a surprise. But she does live in Seattle, and so I think this counts as my first someone-I-know sighting. I was really happy about this. It felt like I passed some kind of milestone, like maybe now “I made it”, even for a minute.

I’ve thought about home the last few months, and started making peace with the fact that I have several, in different places and with different people. I think when you’re young, the idea society gives you is you’re supposed to have one home, one place where you settle and put down roots and stay forever. At least, that’s what I see happening with most of my peers. But maybe they have more homes too, homes I don’t know about, homes that are more intimate than their literal ones.

I feel at home with people, in different places, in different seasons. I used to worry that I’d never find my “true home.” But I’m getting cozy with the idea that I might not have one. “Not all who wander are lost” comes to mind here. Seeing my friend on the street, having her so insistently shouting my name as if to say, “You can’t hide from me girl!” made me feel like I just might have home here, too.

I’ve been quiet (ish) regarding the conversations surrounding women and street harassment that have been circulating the Internet in the last few months. Mostly, it’s because I agree that yelling at or trying to chat up women who are just going about their business is not ok, and that it’s an epidemic with roots of sexism and privilege that are as deep as the snow in Boston. And I don’t have much else to add on this point, so I’ve tried to be quiet and to listen to others who need the space to tell us their stories.

I get my share of catcalls when I’m out in the world. They are uncomfortable and unwanted. Once, some guy yelled from his car that I was the most “beautiful blind chick” he’s ever seen. Which is sort of funny, in a really sad way, and also not ok to yell at someone. I’ve definitely been the recipient of the all too common, “Smile baby. You’re so much prettier when you smile.” Lots of other comments centered around me being blind. I learned early in my bus traveling career not to engage with men who asked me questions or told me lengthy stories about a “friend” of theirs who was blind, and could they have my number for that friend? Seriously?

And you know what? I’ll come clean here: when I was in college and never took the bus, and hardly walked anywhere alone outside of campus, I had some of the same feelings other people have expressed about this issue. Feelings like: “Oh, they’re just trying to be nice”, or, “Come on, you should be flattered, someone’s telling you you’re beautiful, isn’t that GOOD?” They were feelings born from naivete. Sadly, sometimes you can’t learn something, truly, unless you experience it yourself, or see it experienced by someone who is close to you.

I never feel completely at ease walking by myself, even in familiar neighborhoods. And it’s not because I’m afraid of getting lost. No, it’s because I’m afraid some dude will try to talk to me and I won’t be able to escape. Does this keep me from living my life? No, not usually, but I absolutely, 100 percent understand that for some who have it worse than I, it would.

It became clear to me the other day while I was having coffee and working, the extent to which I have been conditioned to be on my guard against physical and verbal attention. A man approached my table, (though I didn’t see him, of course), and said, “Excuse me, are you by yourself?” Before my logical brain could sift through a bunch of perfectly acceptable reasons he might be asking me this, I felt my defenses skyrocket. In these moments, I can physically feel my body preparing to deflect confrontation. My face slithers into itself, closing tight like a fist. My spine straightens, steeling my muscles. My shoulders tense. I look straight ahead, not at the person, pretend I don’t hear or care or understand. A beat passed. He said, “Um, it’s just that, we have a group of seven, and if you’re by yourself, we were wondering if we could switch tables with you.” That was it. He didn’t actually say, “Because if you’re by yourself, I thought I might rape you”, or, (the more realistic one), “Because you’re a beautiful young lady.” No, he just wanted my table, and I fell all over myself to move me and my laptop and the coffee and the dog to give it to him, because I KNOW that I had been rude and actually, contrary to what you might think, I don’t want to be rude. But this is how I’ve built a shell around myself over the years, because the majority of the time they want something else, something more than a table, and even if that something is just a smile and a “thank you” or some other response I’m supposed to give based on being passive and being a woman, I shouldn’t have to adhere to that expectation just to appease someone else’s ego.

I hate that I had that reaction to the table switching guy. I felt badly about it. But as Ani Difranco says, “In this city, self-preservation is a fulltime occupation.” And I’m not getting paid to walk by myself and remain vulnerable to the things that I can’t see, but sometimes, I feel like I should be making millions.