Twenty-Noine

I was thinking about an old conversation I had when I was in middle school–one with my afterschool teacher on her birthday. She told me about how she had thought thirty would be the end for her when she was my age, and I told her how thirty sounded like when life was about to start. 

One of my favorite shows of all time is New Girl, a sitcom following adults in their late twenties and early thirties navigating love and life while rooming together in Loft 4D. I’m on my sixth rewatch of it, and in the tenth episode of the first season, Schmidt, one of the leads, turns twenty-nine (twenty-noine as he puts it). He books out a party bus, worried that this is his last year before, “it’s just all darkness.”

But the ironic thing is, there’s six more seasons where Schmidt, and the rest of Loft 4D, experience what I believe to be the brightest moments imaginable. And sure, by sitcom logic, your twenties and your thirties are golden, but I’m learning all around me how they are in real life too. 

There have been few things I’ve dreamed about as long as finding my perfect sitcom, big, fun, co-ed friend group, and that is in part because of New Girl, yes. But it’s mostly because my parents taught me exactly what that looked like. 

It may be an Indian thing, or just some stroke of luck, but growing up, my family looked like five groups of MBA students who practically lived together. As they were all figuring out when it was time to settle down, find corporate jobs, and buy their first houses, they were always together, postponing reality for time with each other whenever possible. 

Being the first child in the group, I watched as–almost religiously–my house filled up on weekends; they would talk about lay-offs and housing prices and whatever else thirty-somethings had to deal with, but it didn’t matter what they could have been going through because they were enjoying each others’ company. 

And through it all, they were big party people–big on celebrating little wins where they got them. And in my head, they had (have?) it–that perfect sitcom, big, fun, co-ed friend group–straight out of New Girl. 

It’s funny. That life for them would not have happened, had they not been working on their MBAs, had they not been in their early thirties. And the same is true for the New Girl characters who only begin to room together at twenty-nine. 

So I stand by it–that thirty is when your life really begins. Because if I’ve learned anything from my favorite shows, and favorite people, the world won’t end at some arbitrary age. I will continue to dream up my perfect sitcom adulthood, and I can’t wait for it to find me–whenever it decides to!