You shouldn't feel bad if you relate to these memes, too.
When you're in your twenties and fresh out of college, you might be in some form of debt (from student loans or blowing an entire paycheck on rent) and perhaps you're also struggling to find a meaningful career. But this decade is made for mistakes, and the confusion, disappointment, and ego-bruising that come along with them.
But when you're in your thirties, you might feel as if you're in the "adult camp", and begin to pressure yourself to figure everything out.
As writer Julia McVeigh pointed out, the permission to fail seems to have been stripped away and now is the time to reach all the traditional milestones that we associate a successful life with.
This includes — but is certainly not limited to — an impressive title to update your LinkedIn page with, a fulfilling relationship, an incredibly fun wedding; cute but undemanding children, and a house with multiple bedrooms for all of them.
Those who fail to meet these ambitious milestones may feel inadequate, especially during their class reunion where people often measure themselves against each other.
Annie Wright, LMFT, who is a licensed psychotherapist and relational trauma recovery specialist, said that she has heard some iteration of the question "Why does life feel so much harder in your thirties?" nearly a hundred times now.
According to her, being alive in a mortal body, loving other people in mortal bodies, all the while making our way in a world that requires money to pay bills and so on and so forth is hard as it is.
But she suggests that life might be even harder in your 30s for those of us who come from relational trauma backgrounds.
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To illustrate her point Wright gives this example: if life is a proverbial house, built upon a proverbial foundation, those of us who come from relational trauma backgrounds nearly always have cracks in our proverbial foundations that others who come from non-trauma backgrounds do not have at all (or in greatly reduced ways).
And cracks in the proverbial foundation can make the proverbial house less sound, less stable, and more difficult to live in (so to speak).
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"A relational trauma background, as I define it, is trauma that results over the course of time in the context of a power-imbalanced and dysfunctional relationship (usually between a child and caregiver) that results in a host of complex and lingering biopsychosocial impacts for the individual who endured the trauma," Wright explains in Psychology Today.
