THIRTY

My birthday, my pathology.

I’m not a birthday princess—I don’t need flowers and accolades for the sake of being the center of attention. But I do need the day to be immaculate—a perfect transition from one state of being to another. For this reason, there’s always a good deal of fanfare. Last year, for example, I asked a handful of friends to join me in Paris. Again, the desire to be hoisted on shoulders and showered with gifts is not the driving force behind such an expedition—it’s the need for a fresh start. For an extraordinary day that sets the tone for all the days that will follow. My birthday is a ceremony, a procedure.

When Los Angeles caught fire, it felt impossible to surgically transition from twenty-nine to thirty. Celebration was tone-deaf—aging in itself felt like a foolhardy decision. Why would I grow older when there was nothing to look forward to? Why would I celebrate when everything I was working toward—and everywhere I came from—had turned to dust in the wind?

In the wake of destruction, I was forced to examine my intensely unyielding (possibly quirky?) attachment to permanence. My fixation on “home,” on cleaning and keeping and adorning my space and remaining close to it as often as possible. This was a throughline of childhood that dissipated for a brave period into my mid-twenties and then reemerged when my mother left Los Angeles, and my father (who left Los Angeles many years ago) continued to be gone from Los Angeles, leaving me to become the last remaining steward of this city in their absence.

Unsurprisingly, the total destruction of the neighborhood I grew up in—the last remaining shrine to a stable childhood and the distant memory of my all-American teenage life—had an unfortunate effect on my already fragile, paranoia-prone psyche. I found myself unable to relax. Unable to unspool. Unable to summon the kind of faith my parents once mustered when they took a chance and set down roots in a secluded little (flammable) mountaintop hamlet by the sea. My dreams of a home, a life, a world built upon a strong foundation were crumbling in my nearly thirty-year-old hands—hands that, until that time, were eager to take hold of the future.

Of course, the pragmatists (my boyfriend) and the contrarians (my mother) have said that all things are possible with a simple shift in location. “There’s a lot of beautiful neighborhoods in LA outside of Malibu and Topanga and Laurel Canyon,” say the pragmatists. “You may need to consider leaving Los Angeles altogether one day,” say the contrarians. Each time these suggestions are made, I take a moment to clap a hand to my heart and bite down on my fist before replying, “Yes—I know,” which the pragmatists and the contrarians understand to really mean, “Art thou a common fool? One does not abandon the canyons and forests and rivers and oceans so easily once they have become embedded in one’s soul! Death! You wish death upon me—this is plain to me now. You wish death upon my spirit!” We (all of us) most often leave it at that.

While I want to be the kind of person who can meaningfully recite greeting card phrases like “home is where the heart is,” I am not. I have concluded that being a rolling stone, a wanderer, a vagabond, is not hereditary. Home, to me, is a timeworn place with walls and floors and ceilings and objects and permanence—all things that apparently hold little value to the forces of nature that could tear through them with wild abandon at any given moment.

For these reasons—these realizations—I tried to stall the procedure of turning thirty, citing nerves, and poor health, and inconvenience, but I was told it would proceed as planned. I was told not to worry about aging—about the loss of youth and beauty (as if I, as a writer—as a person who could transform miraculously into a wrinkled leather shoe in the night and still successfully pursue a career—need to worry about the withering of flesh). I was told not to worry about my career (as if I, as a woman—as a person whose worth is tethered to her appearance, which time will only erode—don’t have more immediate opportunities to worry about wasting).

I wrestled with the dubious nature of life’s impermanence even as I fasted the day before surgery (which would take place in the form of a lovely overnight stay in Ojai). Even on the day, as I watched the doctors and nurses (my boyfriend and the varied strangers we passed on a stunning, psilocybin-addled hike) scrub up and prepare. Even as I steeled myself for the needle and the anesthesia (orange wine and delectable small plates at a wonderful restaurant in town) began to flow into my veins. Even as I counted backward from ten, lying in wait on the operating table (settling into the cozy king-sized bed post bath). Even as the world around me grew dark and I drifted off to sleep.

In the morning, I woke to find that everything went smoothly. I was thirty without a hitch. The doctors and nurses (my boyfriend and the varied strangers milling about the hotel in the early morning) all shook hands and congratulated one another. I remain unsettled on the unsettled nature of settling in, but for now, I’m thirty. Happy Birthday to me.