Dear twenty-something year old woman,

I'm thirty and a handful of days. I live in a sweet small house in a sweet small town.

So much has changed since you wrote a letter to me, years into your future. There are books on the bookshelves and mismatched wooden chairs at the dining room table. The couch is covered in pillows I sewed myself. Lavender is blooming in the front yard, as I type this to you.

I'm married. He has calloused hands and a gentle heart and crawls above or below the house on weekends to swear and fix things that are incomprehensible to me. He loves my mother. He reminds me of dad, a little, in the good ways.

You craved meaningful work, and in many ways my work is not perfect, but it matters to me. I feel met by my days. I remember not to take this for granted.

You want stability? I finally have a retirement account. My husband would like to be buried in our backyard. My dog has a standing dental appointment.

I think about you a lot, even still. I think about all the versions of us that are twisting away as I age, becoming replaced with the far fewer versions of reality that I have the time and real estate to create. I think about how you imagined a million different things- ceramicist in Trinidad, yurt in Santa Fe, midwife in Somalia- and I cheerfully leave those things to you. I come home at the end of the day, a public health nurse in an Oregon cottage, kiss my man, step into some comfy pants, and open the front door, Norah soaring over the front step into the yard.

I think the one thing I would tell you is that is is hard to choose. You don't appreciate this yet because you have never really had to do it, and so in some form or fashion, you had everything and nothing at the same time. But all those chipper thirty-somethings, the subjects of your resentment, had this in common: the winnowing. So many things did not survive the fire. No matter how full and bright their lives looked to you, behind them stood a graveyard.

You will lose things, things you thought you would never lose. People will change in ways you did not expect. Age will turn out to not at all be correlated with wisdom, or empathy, or kindness. There really is nothing that you can protect, even your own heart, and you will learn this over and over again exactly like everyone else learns it- not murmuring to yourself after finishing a memoir, but gasping on the ground like a deer hit by a car.

Also, you now still have acne, but wrinkles as well. To paraphrase your mother, this is not the worst thing that has ever happened to anyone but it certainly doesn't help.

What else did these women know, as they bounded along the block pushing ergonomically correct strollers? Did they feel like this? Defenseless all the way down inside their bodies? Like when you wake up first thing in the morning and even just brushing the back of your calf against the bedframe leaves a bruise?

I read a book recently about the five major mass extinctions the world has seen. Each of these was harrowing beyond description. There is no way for us to imagine the devastation, because we've simply never seen anything like it. Times when something so catastrophic happened that almost every single living thing on the planet died, leaving only the wind and the waves to keep each other company for eons.

If something lives long enough, it eventually becomes inevitable for something this astounding to happen, wrote the author, before describing a hellscape seething with fire as megavolcanoes belched lava for hundreds of thousands of years, or an asteroid the size of Mount Everest hitting the earth many times faster than a bullet ejected from a gun.

You will turn thirty on a Wednesday, ravaged by the small volcanoes that have finally come for you, embarrassed by the streamers a coworker hangs in your office, wanting nothing other than, pathetically, to just be left alone.

This was not a finish line you surged across, victoriously, the way you imagined years ago. You were fine, until you weren't. Until you couldn't stand to lose even just one more thing. Is this what it's like for everyone?

This is what the thirty-something-year-old-women were too busy or perhaps just too kind to tell you- that there are things you will have to leave, and there are things that will be taken from you. Not everything, not most things, will come with you. So many will burn over the hill, just out of sight. On the morning of your thirtieth birthday, all you will be able to smell is the smoke.

What happens now? Turn around and let it warm your ass? Let it light your way? Start walking? I don't know. I've only been thirty for a minute. But I know who would know. Maybe one day she'll write to us.

Until then, stay kind. People will tell you to toughen up, but these people are pretty much uniformly assholes. Don't be afraid to leave when you need to. Listen to yourself, because you're the only one you have to wake up and be every day. Say yes when he asks. Say no when anyone tries to blame you for their unhappiness, or their cruelty. Please floss more often, even if you're really tired. Please.

More volcanoes, or God forbid, asteroids, will come. It's okay. Something will kill you one day, but it won't be the sadness these things bring you. Don't be afraid to lose things or people who have already decided to leave. Know that your father won't walk you down the aisle for so many reasons, but he will reach out to touch your shoulder as you go. Wind and waves will sometimes be your companions, but they are not the same as having nothing at all. And underneath them, always, something has already, already begun to grow.