‘13 Going on 30’ Didn’t Prepare Me to Be Thirty, Flirty, and Striving

Weren’t your thirties supposed to be the time when “real adulthood” begins? What if, instead of thriving, you’re striving?

A few years ago, I bought a used DVD of 13 Going on 30 at a Goodwill in New Jersey. The front case of this particular DVD asserts in glittery letters that it’s the “Fun & Flirty Edition,” though I’m not sure what that means because I can’t read the back. It’s obscured by two purple Post-it Notes, taped down by one of the DVD’s previous owners. “Habit is habit and not to be flung out the window but coaxed down-stairs one step at a time. —Mark Twain” is written on one note in a hurried cursive script. The other holds a quote from Darren Aronofsky’s 2010 ballet thriller, Black Swan: “Perfection is not just about control, it’s about letting go.”

I love thinking about the person who wrote these notes. I tend to think of them as someone about the same age as myself, maybe a little older. Someone who collects quotes, who finds real meaning in the movies they love, even connects them to other texts. I love that the Post-its are taped so they will not fall off and be lost. I wonder exactly how this person thinks these quotes apply to 13 Going on 30. They speak to a special relationship to the film, perhaps, and a deeper reading of its themes than I was capable of when I first saw it in eighth grade. I loved it at the time and had no idea how enduring its impression would prove to be.

*

I spent part of this past summer working in a three-story, sixteen-room Victorian hotel at the Jersey Shore. Built in 1870, it was painted a cheerful yellow with red trim. There were wraparound porches on the ground and second floors. It was the very picture of a happy beach vacation. I worked in the hot, grimy basement, washing and folding the laundry. It was the latest in a series of odd jobs that has populated my adulthood: cashier, bartender, waitress, childcare worker, housekeeper, grocery store bakery clerk.

I never stay at these jobs long. I’m always looking around for something better—better pay, better hours, better coworkers. Something consisting of less manual labor, more sitting down, less foot pain, less psychic pain. Aside from writing, I have rarely felt that a job reflected my particular interests, passions, or selfhood. Not that it has to, but I always assumed my work would be more pleasant if it did. Instead, I put my head down and slog through a shift, before clocking out to live my real life—quiet, not particularly exciting, but mine.

At my hotel laundry job, I arrived in the morning and put load after load of dirty towels from the previous day into the washing machines. While waiting for the loads to finish, I’d go through the stained-towel bin and use a toothbrush to scrub the toughest stains out. The basement had no air conditioning, and sweat dripped down my neck as I scrubbed lipstick out of towels and blood out of sheets. When the towels were finished in the washing machines, I loaded them into dryers. When they were finished in the dryers, I folded them. Heaping bags of dirty towels disappeared and then reappeared, over and over again. Sisyphus. His boulder. Me. Those bags of dirty towels.

I was quick in my work. I kept up with the laundry even on the busiest days. I had a friendly rapport with the housekeepers. I folded the towels perfectly, in the exact way they showed me. And every day, I walked home with a pit in my stomach. I was thirty-two years old and I had long hoped that I would be in a different place by this time in my life. I hoped that I would have a job that I didn’t hate, that didn’t exhaust me to the bone, that I wasn’t desperate to quit.

I thought I would have more money by now, sure. A heftier savings account, maybe even a healthy benefits package. But what I really wanted was to feel settled. I wanted to feel like I had arrived in my life, like I had heard was supposed to happen in your thirties. Weren’t your thirties supposed to be the time when “real adulthood” begins? Wasn’t I supposed to have figured out what I wanted to do, and be making specific steps toward specific goals?

A quick Google search of “what are your thirties like” reveals this as a common cultural understanding. Apparently, your thirties are when you hit your financial stride. The messiness and uncertainty of your twenties are gone. You know how to ask for what you want. You are filled with a sense of acceptance. You should also, apparently, have a white-T-shirt collection, mature underwear, and a work-to-play blazer.

There clearly isn’t a singular cultural product that set up my expectations for my thirties, but I think 13 Going on 30 influenced me more than any other. The movie centers on Jenna Rink, a thirteen-year-old girl who’s bullied at school, obsessed with magazines, wants to have boobs, and is desperate to skip her teen years and go straight to age thirty. On her thirteenth birthday, through some poorly explained magic, she transforms into her thirty-year-old self, played by Jennifer Garner.

Weren’t your thirties supposed to be the time when “real adulthood” begins?

Adult Jenna has an apartment on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, a famous pro-athlete boyfriend, and a walk-in closet full of flashy, expensive clothes. She has grown up to be one of the editors of her favorite fashion magazine, Poise. It’s the life she always dreamed of. But she doesn’t speak to her parents anymore. She hasn’t spoken to Matty, her best friend from high school, since they were teenagers. She is cruel to her coworkers and assistants. She has forsaken the thirteen-year-old girl she once was. Or rather, the thirteen-year-old girl she still is.

*

13 Going on 30 came out when I was fourteen, and I loved it. Its intended messages are so platitudinous they could be embroidered onto pillows: Be yourself. Kindness is important. You can’t rush your life. You already have everything you need to be who you want to be. And yet, its trite messages never quite penetrated my consciousness.

I related to young Jenna’s desire to grow up. I also couldn’t wait to shed the pain and misery of adolescence. I would have been happy to skip my teen years altogether and catapult straight into adult life. Like Jenna, I was also highly influenced by fashion magazines: Jane, CosmoGirl, Seventeen, Teen Vogue—I read them all. My mom subscribed to Vanity Fair, and I’d flip through the pages, not reading a word. Just enjoying the gloss. I made vision boards filled with thin women who I would never look like, wearing clothes I would never be able to afford. I wanted adulthood and I equated it with glamor.

Anytime I’m called upon to imagine my “dream job” as an adult, I think of a scene from 13 Going on 30. It’s Jennifer Garner, dressed in head-to-toe baby pink, standing at the front of a boardroom. There are poster boards behind her covered in pictures of chic, serious models that have been cut out of Poise. She’s nervously fiddling with a small pink balloon and speaking passionately about magazines and life and beauty.

In this scene, Jenna is trying to save her job at Poise. She is pitching her idea for a magazine redesign. Taking the poster boards covered in models off their stands, she reveals new ones underneath. These are covered in more pictures of beautiful models, but these models are dressed in cheerleading outfits. They’re at a football game and a winter formal.

“I think all of us want to feel something that we’ve forgotten or turned our backs on,” she says to her rapt audience, “because maybe we didn’t realize how much we were leaving behind.”

It’s a scene that is intended to show that Jenna’s naivete is an asset. People tend to lose touch with their younger selves as they grow, but it’s Jenna’s close connection to her childhood self that makes her successful.

My fourteen-year-old self only saw her outfit and her smooth hair. I saw her as a cool girl with a cool job in a cool city with no regard to the drive, the connections, and the money one already has to have to attain that level of success. It’s purely the aesthetics that stuck with me for decades. Maybe this is why I’ve struggled to envision my dream job, why all I can conjure is an empty and unattainable image of beauty and glamor. That version of adulthood hasn’t materialized because it just isn’t real.

Eventually, Jenna wishes herself back to thirteen. The movie ends with a flash-forward to adult Jenna’s marriage to Matty. They move into a pink house in the suburbs. Gone are the flashy clothes and the magazine job. She has sacrificed the empty beauty of her previous destiny for a life full of love.

Obviously, I don’t have this choice. I don’t get to go back to thirteen and start over, making better choices. I don’t have a chance to be kinder to the people I love, to make better financial decisions, to stick it out at a job I hate because it might lead me somewhere. I can’t reverse engineer my thirties, give myself the life I thought I was supposed to have.

The only thing I can do is recognize those cultural directives for what they are: false. My life isn’t a place where I will suddenly arrive. It’s not a destination, but an ongoing project. The building of yourself never ends. Do I really want to equate my worth with what I do for money? Or measure it by arbitrary benchmarks of success, like knowing what a work-to-play blazer is? No, I don’t. Do I do it anyway? Yes, I do. Am I trying not to? Yes. Am I succeeding? I don’t know.

That version of adulthood hasn’t materialized because it just isn’t real.

*

I keep thinking about the Black Swan quote on the back of my DVD of 13 Going on 30: “Perfection is not just about control, it’s about letting go.” The quote’s original context is sinister. It’s said by a director who, in order to achieve a better performance, uses his power to degrade his lead dancer’s mental state. The Post-it on the back of my DVD forces this quote into a different context. The words letting go are underlined. In the gleam and sparkle of the 13 Going on 30 Fun & Flirty Edition, it reads as yet another wholesome platitude.

I’m tempted to fit it into this narrative, to make some connection between this quote that came to me by chance in a Goodwill and my need to let go—of cultural trappings that don’t serve me, of the idea that success is measured by what I do to pay my bills, of the feeling that life rises up toward a final point rather than expands outward infinitely. I’m tempted to believe that relinquishing control and letting go might lead me to the type of clarity and understanding that could be embroidered onto a pillow in a Rae Dunn font at HomeGoods.

Of course, it isn’t as simple as all of that. I can’t just vanquish thirty years of cultural expectations and emerge as a completely liberated being. What would that person be like? Would I even want to be her? Besides, the Black Swan quote isn’t really about letting go to free yourself from cultural constraints. It’s about letting go to achieve perfection. Whatever connection my stranger saw between this quote and a romantic comedy from 2004 remains a mystery to me. I think I prefer it that way.

As I write this, I am two weeks away from my thirty-third birthday. Supposedly, this is the year that most people find true happiness. I seriously doubt it. I’m more lost than ever. I have no idea what I want to do with my life. I’m not going to lie and say that that’s alright with me, or that I’m having a good time. But I’m going to try to avoid forcing answers, or meaning, or connections. I’m just going to go with it for a while.