Starting Over at 30…
Why It Doesn’t Mean You’ve Failed (Even If It Feels Like It)
Turning 30 is weird.
Not in the "oh wow I'm so wise and mature and put together now" way. More like... "how the hell did I get here, and why do I feel like I'm already behind?"
There’s a quiet kind of panic that comes with turning 30 when you don’t have your life “together.”
For years, I dreaded this birthday.
Not because I feared aging, but because somewhere along the line, 30 became this invisible deadline. The age where you're supposed to have your life neatly tied up in a bow—successful career, stable relationship, maybe even a mortgage and a couple of kids.
Especially if you’re a woman, the checklist expands: Society pushes this quiet, suffocating expectation: By 30, you should be a fully functional adult. Productive. Stable. Thriving. Bonus points if you’re also happily married and prepping for motherhood—while killing it in a high-income job.
Even Emma Watson felt the dread, like she talked about it in this interview:
Honestly, I had not a life put together and figured out as I was supposed to have. I was very far away from that.
For a long time, the idea of not being what society expected of me at 30 felt more terrifying than death.
Not because I was dramatic, (although between us, I certainly am dramatic) but because in a world where success is supposed to peak in your 20s, having achieved nothing by 30 feels like you missed the train—and it’s not coming back.
At 27, the dread hit hard. I was dangerously close to 30 and still had no clue what I was doing with my life. No path. No plan. Just anxiety.
And as I got older, it got scarier to pivot and start over… am I not already too old to be trying new things? To change careers? Why does it feel like everyone has found their place in the world and I keep on missing the mark?
This January, I turned 30. And I had to face my most terrible fear: being a failure in the eyes of society, and worse, in the eyes of my parents, who were always so proud of me…
But if I’m honest, I never really planned for any of this. Because I never thought I’d live this long in the first place.
It sounds dramatic, but it’s real. I never really saw a future for myself beyond 18. Not because of anything specific, just this silent, looming belief that I wouldn’t make it that far.
So I never planned for later.
Later wasn’t promised. It wasn’t even real.
But later came.
18 turned into 22. Then 25. Then somehow, 30. And I was still here—without a roadmap, just vibes, confusion, and a gnawing sense of failure.
It felt abstract. Distant. Unreal. So I didn’t prepare for it. I drifted through my 20s in a fog, hoping things would somehow click into place. But they didn’t.
They told me my 20s would be the best decade of my life—freedom, adventure, love, purpose.
What I got instead was burnout, breakdowns, and the overwhelming pressure to pretend I was fine.
"all of my cages are mental
Photo Mix Media project created and edited by Ery Falco.
Photography Direction by Isabel Taracena.
FEB 2025
While people posted about their glowing partners, MBAs in Europe, high-paying jobs, and luxe apartments, I was falling apart.
Meanwhile, I was spiraling in a fog I couldn’t explain.
I couldn’t date—I thought, who the hell would want to build a life with this mess?
I couldn’t land a job—I came off as bored, anxious, or disconnected. Honestly? I wouldn’t have hired me either.
My 20s weren’t glamorous. They felt like pushing a boulder uphill every single day. A constant cycle of starting over, losing steam, falling into shame.
And no one tells you how lonely it feels to be the one person in your group who feels like “she is the problem” and feels like a burden.
And well to be fair, something was really wrong with me. Well, not with me, but inside me, inside my crazy brain. I was mentally unstable and for the first time in my life I learnt about being neurodivergent.
But to make it worse, that word didn’t have a nice reputation and I felt being ostracized from society as if I carried the plague or something worse.
And instead of accepting it right away as it is, just having a brain wired differently, I assumed myself as an ill, cursed or even handicapped person who could never be normal again (not that I was ever normal, but before I had the illusion of being normal and now even that got taken away from me).
all of my cages are mental
Photo Mix Media project created and edited by Ery Falco.
Photography Direction by Isabel Taracena.
FEB 2025
When I spiraled into anxiety, depression, and daily panic attacks, that I couldn’t hide nor control anymore, I finally saw a psychiatrist.
I got diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder
And I thought it was a good start, to at least know what I was dealing with.
But the issue was that I didn’t have BPD, I got the wrong diagnosis.
But I wouldn’t know until 8 years later. For 8 years, I was treated for a condition I didn’t have.
I think the worst part were the meds I was given, because they numbed me out of existence. They didn’t just stabilize my mood—they disconnected me from reality. My brain was hijacked. I couldn’t focus, couldn’t plan, couldn’t even finish my college thesis. I graduated, sure—but barely.
But if it wasn’t Borderline… What was that?
ADHD
and maybe AuDHD (but that is still to be determined)
But no one saw it. I went to different psychiatrists (all male) and none of them thought of getting me tested for ADHD, never.
You see, ADHD (and AuDHD) women are more often than not wrongly diagnosed, because mental health and neurodivergence are not well studied in women, and we react different as men who are also ADHD or AuDHD. So when the patient (like in this case: me) does not behave as the standard to diagnose (a common man with ADHD or AuDHD), well, she (me) gets diagnosed with everything else that can explain her behaviour (like me getting diagnosed as BPD).
I might be wrong, but in my experience this feels like the modern diagnosis for “hysteria” that women got not so many centuries ago just because they had different symptoms than men who had the same neurodivergence.
So a man would have ADHD but a woman would be hysterical, borderline, bipolar…
So, until I was diagnosed as ADHD, the meds I was taking for BPD numbed me, and I Was Living in a Trance
And it felt like this
all of my cages are mental
Photo Mix Media project created and edited by Ery Falco.
Photography Direction by Isabel Taracena.
FEB 2025
all of my cages are mental
Photo Mix Media project created and edited by Ery Falco.
Photography Direction by Isabel Taracena.
FEB 2025
all of my cages are mental
Photo Mix Media project created and edited by Ery Falco.
Photography Direction by Isabel Taracena.
FEB 2025
I really had a hard time differentiating reality from fantasy. I had a hard time getting out of my head.
And that led me to detached from my friends.
From my goals.
From myself.
On the outside, I smiled and masked. I just played the part so well. I went to parties. I laughed at the right moments. I blended in.
But on the inside, I felt like a piece of broken furniture—useless, invisible, forgotten.
Mostly, it felt like if I died it would make no difference…
(just to quote “Down Bad” by Taylor Swift, because I am a swiftie and you’ll read many quotes from her from now on.)
all of my cages are mental
Photo Mix Media project created and edited by Ery Falco.
Photography Direction by Isabel Taracena.
FEB 2025
Have you ever felt so detached from your humanity or the world around you that it made you feel that if you disappeared, no one would notice?
Have you ever felt like you weren’t human?
Have you ever felt like life was just an illusion?
Have you ever felt your life was someone else’s movie and you were just an extra in the back? Or a piece of prop or decoration?
As if you were just another decorative object or furniture in the room. I can’t explain the feeling, but I felt something like that.
But Art Saved Me
The only thing that truly made me feel alive was: ART.
At first, not making it—just experiencing it.
I didn’t feel like creating anything during that time. I would just stare at a blank page or canvas with a blank mind as well.
(just as a disclaimer here, if there is any art theoorist or purist over here, you have to know that I am addressing art as basically everything created by another soul / human being that evokes feelings like: Music. Poems. Novels. Films. Paintings… so yes, even Pop Music and even Netflix series. I know, I know, not all of these are “art” in the proper sense, but I am considering works that made me feel something again, that made me feel alive.)
So, true to be told, I started to find myself in the words of Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson, and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.
I saw my internal chaos and pain represented in the visuals of movies from the German Expressionism era and the films from Ingmar Bergman.
The songs of Taylor Swift, Lindsey Stirling, and Lana Del Rey spoke directly to my soul.
And even comedy series like Friends, would make me smile again, and even childish cartoons, like MLB helped—mostly because my inner child needed healing too.
Art gave a voice to the void, emptiness and numbness I didn’t know how to name. It mirrored my chaos—and made it beautiful.
Then One Day, I Made Something Again
Before the meds, I used to write constantly. I invented worlds, characters, and dialogues. My head was constantly creating and imagining scenarios that would likely never happen but still entertained me and my friends.
But for nearly a decade, that voice went silent. My mind was blank and numbed, and nothing came out of it. I even felt at sometime that I had lost that ability to create and tell stories.
all of my cages are mental
Photo Mix Media project created and edited by Ery Falco.
Photography Direction by Isabel Taracena.
FEB 2025
I also painted as a kid. I was never a real talented oil painter or visual artist but I loved it.
But that too stopped in my teens, when emotional chaos made even blank canvases feel threatening. And I had nothing to express in myself but a dark void.
But one day, in fact, a few months ago before my 30th birthday, I picked up a paintbrush again and even finished a painting I had left incomplete 8 years ago. And I finished it in days, like I had never stop painting.
Then I wrote a sentence again. I was so happy I hadn’t lost it, that I created again.
And something shifted. Slowly, but surely—I came back to life.
Healing Wasn’t Linear
Something that annoys me so much is that healing is not linear, there is not a progress either linear or exponential that once you start getting better you can never turn back.
I didn’t know healing had setbacks and spirals. I didn’t know healing hit in waves.
Some days, I felt like I was crawling when days before I was sprinting. I didn’t understand how I could go 3 steps just to turn back 4.
Have you ever played a board game called snakes and ladders? It was popular when I was a kid, (so it’s ok if you have no idea what I am talking about)
In this board game, as in almost any other game, you threw the dice and moved forward your token. And if you landed in a square connected by a ladder you could skip parts, like going in a shortcut towards the end goal. But if you unfortunately landed on a square with the tail of a snake, well you had to fall down into the square where the head was lying.
So for me this feels like healing.
Some days you hit the jackpot and even move so fast that it feels like you are taking a shortcut.
But some other days, you slide into the snakes tail and you are thrown a few steps back or sometimes even to square 1.
Sometimes while everyone I knew was getting promoted, married, moving abroad, or having babies.
I was just trying to remember to eat. Or get out of bed.
But here’s the truth: progress is not linear.
It comes in waves. Tides. Crashes. Starts and stops. And starts again.
You think you’ve figured it out—then a wave pulls you under again.
But if you keep swimming, you eventually make it to shore.
And that’s what matters. Not quitting.
“Late Blooming”, digital art by Ery Falco (you can order a print if you’d like here)
That is why, my 30s is my blank slate
So, this January, I turned 30. And I had to face my most terrible fear: being a failure in the eyes of society, and worse, in the eyes of my parents, who were always so proud of me…
But I didn’t feel scared anymore. I actually felt... peaceful.
Because I had survived the most painful decade of my life. And now, I finally get to live—not just survive. Now, for the first time, I have expectations. I want peace. I want healing. I want to feel safe in my own head.
And maybe I’m a late bloomer.
Maybe I’m 10 years (or more) behind. Maybe people will judge me for starting over at 30.
But honestly? I don’t care. This is my chance. My second shot. My fresh start.
This Time, I’m Choosing Me
I want to build a life around art, expression, and connection.
I always wanted to dive into the creative artist and content creator life, but never got the gut to do it, I didn’t believe I could do it, and I didn’t think I had something valuable to share.
But I do. I have my personal story, my experiences. And the stories and art I create too.
I want to create—stories, visuals, posts like this—that make someone out there feel a little less alone.
Because, I think the worst part of going through all of this was feeling alone. I mean, I wasn’t alone. But I felt like I was because I just didn’t know how to ask for help. And didn’t want my existence to be a burden to anyone I cared about.
But if you’re in the dark right now, alone wondering if you should reach out to someone, the answer is yes, always yes. You are not alone, and even if you feel like you are or people around you make you feel that way, let me tell you, you have me.
And if you are wondering too if it ever gets better—it does.
And not because everything suddenly clicks or life becomes easy.
But because you choose to stay. To keep going. To keep creating—even when it hurts.
So yeah, starting over at 30 might look like failure in a world obsessed with early success.
But for me? It feels like freedom.
This time, I’m writing the story.
And if you’re just starting yours—at 30, 35, 40, or 50—you’re right on time.
Let’s do this together.
If this resonated with you and you want to keep in touch, feel free to join my email list, or my Patreon.
I am just starting to build a community in Patreon of neurodivergent creatives for us to support each other.
If you want to join, I am giving away for free some spots for 6 months.
Use this link to join. (if you can’t join, it means the spots are all taken, but don’t worry, the tier is less than a coffee per month, just 5 USD and you can have a 7 day free trial if you want to try if it is for you)
I share personal stories, thoughts on creativity, healing, and art—and I’d love to connect with you there.
You’re not alone. You never were.
And you’ve still got time.
Love you,
Ery Falco
RELATED LINKS
Are you an artist interested in creating your personal brand on social media? Check out this is the course I took to learn how to do so.
Would you like to buy any art prints I make? Go here to my online shop
