Nothing but a number...?

I mostly deal in words: incessant (and insistent) emails from clients and colleagues; advice to clients; drafting documents; seemingly endless 'to do' lists; tweets and blog entries.  The numbers in my life are largely limited to billable hours and time-recording.  Recently, however, numbers have been playing a larger role: I have 13 working days left as a lawyer (hallelujah!); 27 days as a resident of London; 62 days left of my twenties; and 82 days until my PGCE course begins.

All very exciting and although I've been planning this for some time (maybe because of the fact I've been planning it for some time), it doesn't quite seem real. Maybe it's a coping mechanism? (I have a lot of those.) I just can't quite believe that I'm actually getting to leave law (I really don't like my job - in case you hadn't noticed), moving back to Northern Ireland, turning thirty (thirty! I'm not sure I feel seventeen, never mind thirty...) or starting on a new career path.

I didn't think turning thirty would bother me. I mean, there's not really anything I can do about it and everyone says your thirties are better than your twenties...Don't they? Don't they?!  It doesn't really bother me (honest), but it has made me wonder if I can still accurately and fairly be described as 'young'. At what age does that stop applying? When does 'young' just start meaning 'younger than me'? If anything, it's losing that moniker which scares me more than the whole turning thirty business. I'm definitely in the 'young' category at my law firm. There's a partner who, at 78, still comes to work most days, so that helps, but still... Come September, though, I'm going to be at university where I am a lot less likely to be in the 'young' category. And when I'm on teaching practice the probability of my being in the 'young' category only becomes a possibility when qualified to mean 'young member of staff' (and even then it's not guaranteed)... If I'm not 'young' any more, then what am I, exactly? I'm certainly not old enough to be classified as middle aged (for which I am very grateful) so maybe I'll just have to be moniker-less for a while. Rather than a fear of ageing (to which the many and varied contents of my bathroom cabinet are testament enough), I think I'm more concerned about what not being young means about my life; when I was eighteen, I probably did think I would have been married by now and I might even have had a baby. My own Mum had been married for eight years and had a six-year-old and a four-year-old by the time she turned thirty. But things were different then and, as she is forever telling me, I've had a lot of opportunities that she didn't have. Still, I definitely think there's nothing like getting married, getting a mortgage or having children for making you realise that you're now a Grown Up.  I have yet to do any of those things (if I ever do) so maybe there is part of me that is forever going to feel young. Admittedly, the fact that I'm going to be living with my parents probably isn't helping (even though I will probably be in the 'granny annex' (Note to self: think of a better name for that))... So eligible gentlemen of Northern Ireland: I'm going to be thirty, unemployed and living at home. Please form an orderly queue.

Maybe I drag myself over the coals about it all because I'm the oldest in my group of friends (I really need to get some older friends...). I also have a summer birthday which, in NI, means I was older than a lot of my school year and this, teamed with a gap year, made me older than the friends I made at university and law school, too. All but one of my Northern Irish friends are married and now my university friends are all lining up to follow suit. I also have friends with children (plural) and part of me still sees the sixteen and seventeen-year-old girls going to nightclubs in Banbridge and pretending to be French exchange students to get boys... To be fair to my friends (husbands and children aside), I think that most of them are still more than willing and able to don a silk neckscarf and give it another go...

After all, as the saying goes: growing old is mandatory; growing up is optional.

"Change the way you look at things and the things you look at change"

My Mother is thoroughly bemused by my new-found appreciation for Northern Ireland and all things rural. There's no doubt that it is a beautiful place and I will admit that I have been guilty of taking such charms for granted in the past. It has made me wonder where else my attitude to something has, or could, change; after all, as Hamlet says, "...there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so".

Recently, I've been trying to eat more healthily and get some exercise, as I was alarmed to discover I weighed more than I ever have before. I think the most disturbing thing, however, was realising that about three years ago I weighed twenty-five pounds less that I do now... I know that I am very unlikely to ever weigh that little again (I had a lot going on at the time), but part of what shocked me was that it (finally) began to sink in just how tiny I must have been back then and yet I just couldn't see it. Plenty of people told me(!) but I couldn't (or wouldn't) see it. Even now, looking back at photographs from that time, I have difficulty in appreciating it. Our perception of something we are supposed to know so intimately (and you can't get much more intimate than yourself) can be not just incorrect, but so far removed from reality as to be irrational. Despite the fact that I let myself gain quite so much weight, I think (hope) I have a much more realistic take on what my body should look like.  The frustrating thing is having to find the patience to let it get that way in a sensible manner and in a sensible time-frame.

I suppose over the last eighteen months of so I've been re-examining and revising my entire life; looking at aspects afresh, deciding whether they still 'fit' and, if not, doing something about it: where I live, who I'm with and what I do for a living. Just because something, someone or somewhere worked for me when I was 21, 23 or 27, doesn't mean that will or has to always be the case.  Don't get me wrong, there is a lot to be said for having the tenacity to see something through, but I think the key (and the difficult part) is to decide when to fight and when to change tack entirely. As with so many things in life, you only get to find out if you did the right thing after you've done it...