Turning 27.

What’s good everybody.

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By the time this blog will be out and you are reading this, I’ll be 27 years old.

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Which means I’m officially in my mid to late twenties.

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Which means I’m basically already 30.

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I don’t feel old at all though. I actually feel the healthiest I’ve ever felt right now. Working out every day, spending a few hours outside, given up on some vices, eating mostly healthy but still finding time to drink 1-2 or 5 beers every now and then.

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Not the ideal picture of health, but pretty sold all things considered.

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How I’m Feeling

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Overall, I feel great.

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Mentally, I still feel like I’m the same person I’ve always been, just with another year of experiences in an older body. I wonder if that’s how it feels throughout someone’s entire life. Like they’re the same person mentally, but obviosly their body ages as time goes on.

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As I get older, I feel like I become more comfortable with uncertainty and the fact that I actually don’t know as much as I thought I did. And that’s okay, it’s actually freeing in a way.

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With that realization is a sense of calmness and patience that I have always had to a degree, but now feels even more present.

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I feel as if problems and obstacles appear on a daily basis, and as life goes on they seem to get bigger and harder to solve. But I also get better at solving them with age and wisdom, which gives me confidence that no problem is too large to fix.

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The best way I can describe it is, while I may not have all the answers, I’m confident I can always at least find them if I have to.

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I was at dinner with my grandma last week when she asked me, “What does it feel like being almost 27?”

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I told her nothing really feels any different. The only difference is, I’ve made more mistakes and learned from them, which makes me feel wiser.

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She smiled and said that was a good answer.

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Personal Growth

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The past year has been one of huge personal growth for me. Not from any particular experiences, but mainly from the situations I’ve chosen to willingly put myself in.

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I remember a few years ago when I was single and on this romantic self improvement journey. I would run through countless self help books, listen to these philosophy and science podcasts, write in my journal, and even practice meditation.

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I was really all in trying to repair and optimize my life based on what all the info on the internet at the time was telling me to do.

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But now, I don’t find myself doing any of that stuff (I still do read though, reading is fire). But  what I ended up growing the most from was not consuming all of this self help content, but it was actually going out and living life.

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I think most of my growth has derived from two main experiences.

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Career

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Deciding to run my own business and work for myself has been one of the single hardest and satisfying experiences I’ve ever been through.

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Compared to high school and college, those things were a breeze. But running a business that your livelihood depends on is a whole different beast entirely.

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I’ve gone from naively believing I could do it with absolutely zero experience with entrepreurship and starting something without a clue of how to make it successful…

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To now, where I still don’t know everything not even close. But after over a year and a half of trial by fire, improving every day by 1%, I feel I’m starting to actually get the hang of things.

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Just like anything else in life, if you just stick to something and keep at it every single day, you’re bound to improve. It’s literally impossible not to.

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Purposely going out of my way to put myself in uncomfortable situations has been huge for me. Whether it be approaching businesses in person, going to entrepreneur mixers, talking to strangers, hell I even started making Instagram Reels, all in an effort to grow my business has really developed sense of growth within me that I don’t think I would have gotten doing anything else.

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Relationships

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Being in a long term relationship has definetely challenged me in ways I never would have been able to predict.

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When you commit to someone and spend so much time around them, you get to experience them and all of their quirks, and maybe even notice things they don’t notice about themselves. But what also happens is, they notice quirks and learned behaviors from you as well.

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You’re basically inviting someone into your life to analyze you as closely as possible from an outsiders perspective. And if you choose the right person, hopefully they’re honest with you and point out some blind spots you can’t necessarily see, for better or for worse.

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For someone like me who was single for so long, I definetely became set in my ways to a certain extent because frankly, I had to. Everybody does when they are single for long enough.

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I find when you begin a new relationshp, that version of yourself is challenged to adapt to no longer think about yourself, but how will this affect my partner (this is something I am still working on).

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You also learn to argue and fight (in a productive way). The hardest part of my growth from the relationship has been learning how to handle the emotions of another person. Whether they are upset and just want to be heard, disagree with my opinion, or upset with me and I now have to resolve this issue while staying calm and collected myself.

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All of these things have challenged me to become a more thoughful, empathetic, and less judgemental person overall. Experiences that I never really had access to as a younger single guy.

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Giving Myself Grace

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As I get older, I tend to notice some of my own quirks from self analyzing myself over the years.

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One thing is, I realize I tend to carry a huge weight on my shoulders from striving to be the best version of myself for everybody and every role I serve in my life.

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Whether that being the best son, friend, brother, or boyfriend, I’m constatly trying to be perfect at all of these simultaneous roles to the point where when the eventual decision has to be made to benefit one, but take away from the other, I feel guilt about it.

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This pressure I give myself becomes quite a lot to bear sometimes. But it’s because I don’t want anyone around me to feel as if I’ve abandoned them and am actively not choosing them.

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It gets to a point where I spend so much time and effort trying to support other people, that I dont take that same amount of effort and pour into myself as I should.

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Maybe it’s from some weird childhood trauma that I’ve yet to uncover or something, but it seems I’m just wired like that. It’s like I have a fear of letting people think I’ve left them behind and abandoned them, so I do all I can to be everybody’s emotional support rock.

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I’m not really sure what’s going on there. Maybe I’m deep down a massive people pleaser and have a hard time telling people no and making tough decisions.

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This is something I’m still working on as well.

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Final Thoughts

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The week leading up to my birthday has actually been kind of a weird one for me. I’ve been having all sorts of weird emotions I’m not sure what to do with or where they come from.

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I’ve heard from somewhere before, whenever you’re about to go through a big change in life, you will start to feel anxious about yourself and your life in general. This doesn’t necesarily mean it’s a bad thing, but it means a change is coming.

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Change is scary. But also change is a part of life. And whatever the next change or part of life brings me, I suppose I’m ready for it.

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I feel deep down I’m on the right path, and whatever squishy corner of my brain that is responsible for making difficult life decisions will be able to make the right ones moving forward.

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Not because I have all the answers, but because I’m confident I can find them.