I recently heard a door shut. It wasn’t loud like a slam; instead it was one of those doors that closes, so very quietly, you almost don’t notice it. It was the door to my twenties. This shouldn’t be surprising because I’ve been securely fastened into my thirties for six months now, but when I heard it I thought: “Oh wow, it’s actually happened.” You see if anything miraculous occurred the moment I turned thirty, I was too drunk to realize it. I suppose I was expecting everything to become clear, but instead everything seemed a little more fuzzy than usual.

Since I’d long held thirty in my mind as the imaginary finish line for juvenile delinquency, I wondered why I was waking up with stale merlot-breath and a naked twenty-five year old next to me. Wait, the twenty-five year old was my boyfriend but still, he had wino breath too. As the haze lifted, it became apparent that I was clinging desperately to my youth and trying to pass it off as cuddling. I didn’t hear any doors shut that August night, because I still had something firmly planted in the past.

But why? What was so goddamned great about my twenties that I would want to hang out longer than necessary and not start picking out cutlery that actually matches like any respectable thirty year old? Why didn’t I want to run away screaming?

Because your twenties are hard to get over.

The decade of your twenties is like being in a long-term relationship with an emotionally abusive lover that you just can’t seem to shake off. It tears you down and builds you back up and by the time your twenties dump you, you’re a different person. A few things marked my twenties that have made me the woman I am today; Snickers bars for breakfast, cigarettes for breakfast and boxed wine for breakfast. On a particularly good morning, all three at once. Besides the most important meal of the day there was also falling in love with the right person, then the wrong person, then the right person again who turned out to be the wrong person. There was moving my whole life for love, then moving my whole life for myself. There was losing friends and gaining new ones. Working three jobs and barely scraping by. Working one job and realizing that my brain was atrophying. Becoming an aunt. Not becoming a mother. Learning how to cook edible meals and learning how to say “no”.

Ages twenty through twenty-nine are quite damaging. Suicide is the second leading cause of death among college students who have only just left the nest to begin a whole lifetime of changes. When we change, we have to throw old ideas on the pyre and watch them burn. We also have to throw old versions of ourselves on that fire too. Sometimes the changes are welcomed, but most times they’re not. Nobody wants to change. Not really. We like to think about change, imagine what we’d look or be like after a change, but not everyone takes steps to evolve. Life is what pushes us over the precipice we’re forever looking over. Other people and new situations force us to change against our will, to grow.

Our twenties are about being tossed into the world in order to independently arrive at the meaning of all the madness. It requires, more often than not, at least one colossal crash and burn scenario that goes something like this: We think we know everything, we find out we don’t, we then wipe the mud off our face. This is where it gets hard because sometimes it’s pretty difficult to stand back up after an epic fall. Everything about our attempts to fly and discover what we’re really made of and then crashing can brand us deeper than any success we might have. It could be a struggle with drug addiction, a failed relationship or an illness that cuts us down to our knees and leaves us with a feeling that there’s a gaping hole in the scheme of things and we’re down at the bottom of it. If we’re not careful, we can drag those things with us forever.

I think that’s what I was doing – trying to drag all the baggage from my twenties into my thirties. Doors can’t close if you’re hauling all that with you. Even if I’ve wrapped it up in Louis Vuitton it’s still in the way, and since the prices to check bags are getting more and more outrageous, it’s best if I left it where it belonged – in my twenties. After I heard that door shut all the way, I breathed a sigh of relief.

When I was twenty-four, I really thought it was okay to eat Snickers bars for breakfast. If somebody pulled that crap around me right now, I would make them an omelet with lots of spinach after a bite-sized lecture about blood sugar and the very real possibility that they would end up strapped to a dialysis machine. So what’s up with my dating guys who are still in their twenties? Well, somebody’s gotta help them through the rough patch right?