A week after my trip, I found myself thinking about  my traditionally youthful sartorial choice not only in the context of the last year or so, but also because I had just finished reading April’s M.M. Book Club pick, Kayleen Schaefer’s But You’re Still So Young: How Thirtysomethings are Redefining Adulthood. I kept coming back to the idea that we’re supposed to “grow up” and feel different in our 30s, but at this point in my life, I don’t really know what “growing up” means. 

In But You’re Still So Young, Kayleen profiles various people who are not exactly where they thought, hoped, or were told they should be in their 30s, including herself. “As I got closer to forty, I started looking at my life, and all of what I hadn’t accomplished in my thirties, and I got scared,” she writes. “I worried I was alone.” She goes on to say that she did what most of us do when we’re feeling uneasy about our own lives—she looked around and compared herself to others. “Everyone else had gotten off the bus, while I was still sitting in the back, daydreaming as I looked out the window.”

I can certainly identify with that feeling of waiting for life to happen to me while it seems like everyone else is charging forward. I think most women can, probably because we’re told we should. “In the 1950s, sociologists identified five milestones that, once checked off, signified that someone had entered adulthood,” Kayleen explained during our M.M. Book Club event on April 15th. “The milestones are completing school, leaving home, marrying, and becoming financially independent. In the ’50s, the majority of people had done those things by the time they turned 30.” 

But in 2021, adulthood through this old-school lens doesn’t make sense, and that’s part of why it causes us so much anxiety. From how we date to how we build our careers, the fundamental framework around adulthood has transformed so dramatically in the last 70 years that it’s nearly impossible to make a comparison between life in the 1950s and the lives we live now, and certainly the “unprecedented” life we all endured over the last year. Right now, we deserve to give ourselves, and each other, a little more wiggle room—like another ten years or so?  

In a recent poll M.M. conducted on Instagram, 64% of respondents said they didn’t actually feel like an adult until they were in their 40s. This is much more conducive to our current paradigm—everything from marriage to financial security, and certainly motherhood, is happening much later in life. And as women, delaying or de-emphasising the importance of traditional milestones gives us more time to explore, experiment, make mistakes, and truly figure out what we want. 

What Kayleen noted in our discussion is that even though there’s still an emphasis on traditional milestones that happen in a very specific order, we actually have more choices than we think we do. That said, it’s up to us to recognize and embrace those choices and pursue them. “We don’t have to stay in our hometowns, we don’t have to have a safe career, we don’t have to have the same career forever,” she said. “We can do one job for a little while and change careers. We don’t have to have children, we don’t have to get married. And I think that’s great; the fact that we have choices really opens up a lot of things.” I couldn’t agree more.