by So it’s more than crunch time on my book progress. I have to finish the manuscript, format it, and submit it to editors. I have been woefully behind on my Indiegogo, but that won’t be the case much longer.
I had turned 31 the day before. Two years prior, on the morning of my 29th birthday, I decided then to get over any qualms of the looming 3-0. For the entirety of that year, my first answer if someone asked my age was: “I’m almost thirty.” When the big day finally came and went, there was no lingering on lost youth and regrets.
Instead, I discovered, I had been reinvigorated. I could begin shedding the previous 20 years of psychological torture, the kind that had smartened me up to a “quiet, mature beyond her years” adolescent which leads to “lonely and possibly antisocial” young adult in her twenties.
My thirties were mine. They were no one else’s. I would take no prisoners.
Some three years prior, I boarded a plane from Minneapolis, bound for Los Angeles. It had been a dream years in the making but could never quite take off. I was on the tail end of my 20s then, following the faint trails of what sanity I had. My one and only Hail Mary; my do-or-die reset button on my life.
It worked.
Not unlike detoxing, I spent the first couple of years in L.A. shivering and sweating, oozing out the vestiges of what had poisoned me for so long. I had been frozen by the deep bitch-cold winters of Minnesota, and now the permafrost thawed. I was free.
And now I had even survived the first year of my thirties. Perhaps not thrived by millennial standards, but survived.
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Reidun Saxerud 
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