A Brutal Reckoning at 34: Why I’m Starting Over

I woke up one morning with the realization that I’ve basically been living the same year on repeat since I was 20. There’s no metaphor here; that’s the honest to God truth.

Just the cold, embarrassing, wow I actually have no life truth.

My 20s rolled into my 30s and barely anything changed except my weight increased and my list of excuses got longer. I kept telling myself I was “waiting”… waiting to lose weight, waiting to get more confident, waiting for friends to become available, waiting for a future relationship I felt I would never be emotionally or physically ready for.

I just kept thinking someday… someday I’ll lose the weight, someday I’ll have the confidence, someday I’ll stop depending on my friends, someday I’ll find that person that’s just for me.

And what I’ve come to realize and acknowledge is that “someday” is never going to show up unless I do.

And I wasn’t showing up.
Not for myself.
Not for my life.
Not for anything.

I spent my 20s and early 30s simply existing, not living.
Working, doomscrolling, daydreaming, starting projects I abandoned two weeks later, comforting myself with food and fantasies about a life I wasn’t actually living.

So now I’m rebuilding everything from scratch.

Not the cute kind where you just buy a pretty planner and you light an expensive candle and suddenly your life is aesthetic. No, I mean the uncomfortable, wake up in the middle of the night panicking kind.

Here’s what starting over looks like for me:

• Moving back home at 34 because my finances are a mess
• Facing $16,000 of credit card debt that I created
• Admitting I have almost no real hobbies
• Accepting the fact that I’m scared of basically everything — driving far, being alone in public, being seen
• Learning to cook because DoorDash is not a personality
• Trying to lose weight without hating myself
• Finally accepting that I’m asexual and that it doesn’t make me unworthy of love
• Realizing I might become a single mother by choice one day
• Rebuilding confidence from literal ground zero
• Trying to build a personal style after a lifetime of jeans and a tee uniform
• Learning to actually do things alone instead of waiting on people to do it with me
• Taking responsibility instead of hiding behind excuses

This isn’t a glow-up blog by any means.
This is what it actually looks like when a woman hits her 30s and realizes she doesn’t like where she is in life and is actively trying to change it for the better.

I’m not doing this to be inspirational.
I’m just tired of not living.

So this is me at 34, late bloomer, restarting everything from the ground up. No “poor me”. No delusion. No pretending.

Just a woman being as honest as possible and holding onto the belief that it’s not too late to become someone I actually like.

I’m just starting, but I’ll be sharing what works, what fails, and how it feels to rebuild a life in your 30s. Here’s to showing up for ourselves… even when it’s messy.