My niece called me last week, stressed about a promotion she didn’t get, and I found myself giving her advice I never once followed at her age. I said “your job isn’t your identity” like it was obvious. Like I hadn’t spent an entire decade proving otherwise.
The Life I Was Supposed To Build
Growing up in Seoul, there was a sequence nobody had to explain out loud. Good grades, a good university, a job at a name-brand company, marriage, children, in roughly that order and roughly that timeline. I didn’t question it. I didn’t really think of it as a choice at all. It was just what a life was supposed to look like, and I was good at following sequences.
By 30, I had checked most of the boxes. A corporate job at a company everyone recognized. A husband. A toddler at home. From the outside, it probably looked like I had everything sorted out early, and in a way I had. What I hadn’t sorted out was what any of it actually meant to me, separate from what it was supposed to mean.
What I Believed Mattered Versus What Actually Did
I believed the résumé was the whole point. Every long night at the office felt like proof of something, evidence I was serious, capable, worth keeping around. I measured my worth in overtime hours the way some people measure it in savings accounts. Looking back, I can see how much of that urgency was manufactured, a story I told myself because the alternative, sitting still long enough to ask what I actually wanted, felt unbearable.
The thing I rushed that didn’t need rushing was the idea that I had to have it all figured out by a certain age. I treated 30 like a deadline instead of a number. Meanwhile, the thing I brushed off as unimportant, my own exhaustion, my own needs, sat quietly accumulating interest I’d end up paying later.
I did try a few things to loosen my grip on all of it. I took a week of vacation once, genuinely intending to rest, and spent half of it checking email anyway. That one didn’t stick. It took a lot longer than a single vacation to unlearn any of this.
My Experience
I gave everything to that company. Fully, without holding anything back, the way you’re taught to believe is admirable. There’s something real in that period I don’t want to erase or pretend was all wasted. I was disciplined. I was good at my job. I learned things about pressure and precision I still use.
But somewhere between the promotions and the parenting and the constant motion, I never learned how to take care of myself, or even how to like myself outside of what I was producing. Self-care wasn’t a concept anyone in my world used. You worked, you raised your children, you kept the household running, and whatever was left over, if anything was left over, went to yourself last.
It wasn’t until my 50s, going through perimenopause and suddenly unable to run on the same fumes that used to work fine, that it really landed on me: all that devotion I poured into the company was never mine to keep. The company didn’t remember my late nights. It restructured, reorganized, moved people around, and eventually I moved on too, the way everyone eventually does. What I built for myself in that time, the parts of me that had nothing to do with a job title, turned out to be thinner than I expected.
Looking Back From Here
I don’t think knowing this at 30 would have changed everything. I probably would have made a lot of the same choices anyway, because the world I was in didn’t leave much room for a different answer. Some of that intensity did build a life I’m genuinely grateful for. I’m not interested in rewriting my 30s into a cautionary tale.
But I wish someone had told me, plainly, that loving myself was a skill I needed to practice on purpose, not something that would just show up once everything else was in order. Nothing about that lesson arrived on its own. I’m still learning it, more slowly than I’d like, three decades later.
What’s the thing you gave everything to at 30 that you’d hold a little more loosely now?