The In Between

A native of Boulder, Colorado, Alicia Di Scipio moved to LA after college to pursue a career in music, television, and film. After a successful stint in the industry, she returned to her roots, looking for a change of pace and the answer to the question we all ask ourselves: “What is a life well-lived and how do we achieve it.”

I recently told a friend that I felt like a plastic bag floating in the wind. Untethered, desperately trying to hold on to something but intrinsically aware that I am not in control. We were discussing age. The conversation on everyone’s lips these days seems to be: how are we about to be thirty? My peers are questioning if they did enough in their twenties, if they did too much, and how they will relay that to their future partner, if they feel younger than they are or if the number is starting to feel childish the closer they get. Funny enough, when describing how I felt, I clarified that that feeling is completely detached from the concept of age. It is simply where I find myself in the present moment, regardless of the fact that two months from today, I will no longer be 29.

There’s a book here somewhere. When I started writing this, whatever this is, it had nothing to do with laps around the sun and everything to do with how to feels to return home to your tiny town against the Colorado foothills for the first extended period of time since you were a teenager. To sleep in your childhood bedroom, walk the trails where there used to be a tree fort in the sky above a small creek, to pick up $10 eggs from the local market near the gas station and drive passed the animal shelter you visited the day you skipped AP Stats after breaking up with your high school boyfriend. This piece was about how it really feels being the main character of your story. The drama of those novels of big city girls, almost all hovering around the age of thirty, if not, God forbid, over thirty, coming back to the place they outgrew. I find myself wondering how they get anything done when they’re constantly looking over their shoulder. Wondering if people recognize them, wondering if they want them to, wondering whether they’d be more insulted if they did over if they didn’t.

I was in love with the thought of turning 30. To finally say goodbye to my youthful years and settle into womanhood. The older I get the more I like and accept myself. Aging is such a beautiful, fun part of life.

As someone who is constantly aging myself, I think my thirties will feel like settling into where I’ve always been running towards. I type this to my sister as I sit in the quirky coffee shop on the only street in town. Hanging on the walls of the local watering hole are small canvases with messy blue and red paint that have been mixed to make a dirty brown. From far away, they look somewhat abstract. From close up, you can see them for what they are: paintings done by a small piglet from a neighboring farm. A white card on the bottom right states that the farmer places paint on the canvas and the pig rubs its nose around to create the piece. I think about the things I tell myself I cannot do.

I thought turning 30 would feel like a quiet ending, like the finality of childhood slipping away. Instead, it felt like taking a big, deep breath, like stepping into something new without the pressure of having it all figured out. Does that make sense?

I think I am already doing this. Breathing exercises in preparation and I think I’ll get there and go “oh the air is the same on this side too.” The message sends to my cousin as I walk into the dark blue morning. My days in this small town, that I almost never mention by name because it doesn’t show up when you look at a map, are quite simple, and quite quiet. I wake up to the sound of birds chirping. They remind me of Italy. A trip from a few years ago. The one when I turned 27 and thought all my problems would be fixed if I could just keep my phone on airplane mode, and eat 3 croissants a day and have every birthday cake be chocolate truffle made by an Italian chef named Marcello, who only seems shy because of the language barrier but is most definitely aware of how attractive he is. It was a shock to find out there are birds that sing in America if you wake up early enough. I’ve gotten into a habit of walking most mornings. Through the houses, eventually ending in a large field where I pretended to be an archaeologist when I was a kid. Now parts of the open space are closed off to protect the animals that live there. I walk and listen to an audiobook about the history of hallucinogenic drugs in early Christianity. When I return to the home my parents abandoned for warmer weather, I use the same single-serve pan, ceramic mug, and orange plate as I cook breakfast. I hand wash them in the right side of the sink. It is quite quiet.

As I write this, here in this coffee shop where no one orders because every customer is known by name, there are exactly two months until I turn 30. A number that has taken on a life of its own in the last few years. In the second half of my 29th year, I sold all the furniture I owned, packed up my trinkets, visited every one of my favorite restaurants in the city I called home since I was 22, and after eating Thai food and chocolate cake on the floor of my house shared with my two best friends, I woke up early and drove east. Not all the way east, but more east than the West Coast. Back to the tiny town I ran away from eleven years ago.

I go in and out of how I feel, truthfully. I feel so loved. Look how far I’ve come! And yet the major milestones I haven’t hit seem scarier on this side of things. I simultaneously feel so grateful for where I am and how confident I am, and feel scared about how far I still have to go.

I’ve never felt a stronger sense of self. It’s not myself that I question. It’s wondering about the external, when the boxes are going to be checked, whatever that means. The voice memo sends to my friend as I think about the word sonder. The realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own. A life in which you might appear only once, as an extra in the background. The idea that we are not even supporting characters for those around us, we are unpaid, blurry, filling the foreground of their frame.

When I was younger, I thought I’d “have it all together” by the time I turned 30. Then when I turned 30, I realized that no one has it all together and I felt so at ease entering a new decade knowing who I am, even if I don’t have it all figured out. I didn’t care that I didn’t have it all figured out! Which felt so good.

I go back and forth, struggling with the idea of being the main character of our own lives. I can hear Kate Winslet in The Holiday loudly whispering over the dinner table to Arthur Abbott. Why does it feel self-obsessed to say “this is my life.” Emphasis on my. I am unique. Yet I am just like everyone else. I am too big for this town, yet I can’t meet their eyes. With my head turned down towards the pedestal I’ve propped myself up on, I add more recent photos to the dating apps I swore to my friends I wouldn’t give in to again. But it’s so quiet here, and my phone has begun to resemble a paper weight. I want to fall in love this year, I say through the phone. Not because I’m turning thirty. But because I want to fall in love. He looks familiar. I send a metaphorical rose to the boy with red hair, straight teeth, and freckled arms. The one I told my sister about weeks ago when she asked how I was liking my new yoga studio.

I thought that I’d reach some sort of destination, whether that was another human or a city or a job. But I realized that I don’t really know what I’m looking for, but I do have a much clearer sense of what and who I love and what gives me energy, and what an exciting place to be in that in between.

I was so excited to turn 30, and it ended up being better than I could have expected. I read my sister's message shortly after declining one invitation to France in July and another for Baja in June. I close the tab on my laptop where LinkedIn mocks me. I download a new audiobook to play on my morning walks. I look up the best cocktail bars for a first date in this town that has been taken over by tech money and college kids from California. Utensils clatter into a cabinet near the cash register while instrumental music flows into my ears. Right when I feel self-conscious about eating a brownie the size of a salad plate and an almond mocha at two in the afternoon, a white haired woman across the shop pulls out a shareable box of Mike and Ike’s. The jumbo kind that I’ve only seen in movie theaters. She must be pushing 75. But this is Boulder, I think. We are sitting in a restaurant that doesn’t use seed oils or allow gluten to “walk through the door," as the manager told me earlier. She could be closer to 80. I don’t feel that far away from her. And yet, I want to ask how many jobs she’s quit, how many people she’s held hands with, how many times she asked her friends if they felt like they have any idea what they were doing, and how many times she got exactly what she wanted and realized it didn’t feel how she expected. I want to ask her what I’ve been asking my community lately. What did you think thirty would feel like, and what did it actually feel like once you arrived? She crushes the box of candy and brings her coffee cup to where the barista is standing behind the counter. She puts on her sunglasses and steps into the sun. I stare at my brownie and wonder if we ever stop growing up. Or if the whole point of this is living in the in-between.