Life in my 30s: What I would tell my 20-year-old self

I just finished reading a book by Liane Moriarty called “What Alice Forgot.” It’s about a woman who is in her 30s and while at the gym, she falls off of a treadmill or bike or something and bumps her head pretty badly. She wakes up in the hospital, and the past 10 years is completely wiped from her memory. She remembers life in her 20s and is surprised as she finds out what life in her 30s is like. This book really made me think: if this happened to me, what would surprise me the most about life in my 30s? 

Here’s what I’ve come up with:

• Marriage is hard. Nothing like your favorite JLo movie. Not like any movie really. In fact, movies are generally really unrealistic so please stop letting them shape your idea of anything. 
• Target gets cool. It will be so much more than the store you walk by to get to Ulta or Guitar Center. Target will become your break, your reward, one of your favorite past times. I know that’s bizarre, but trust me. And get the Redcard as soon as it’s offered. It will save you the trouble of politely declining every cashier who asks you to sign up from now through the end of time.
• You’ll be thinking about your thyroid 140% more than you ever have before. Is it overactive? Underactive? When’s the last time you checked it? Adrenal glands too. Check those. You won’t ever be sure what exactly they do but it seems like a lot of your issues stem from these things.
• You start seeing your doctors as your peers instead of authority figures.  It’s startling when you find yourself wishing you could hang out with your kids’ pediatrician because you bond over your love/hate relationship with asthma action plans.  
• Donald Trump becomes the President of the United States. Yes, that one. Yes, I’m serious. 
• Everyone goes to therapy sometimes. And if they don’t, they should. It’s good. Great. Helpful. Sometimes you just need to talk to someone really smart and pay them to help you figure out what’s going on in your own brain. In therapy, you will talk through the fact that Donald Trump is president. Yes, that one.
• Friendships take many years to develop. Once you start having kids and lives and conflicting schedules, building lasting friendships takes a backseat. It’s weird and hard, but expect a good friendship to take 5-7 years to develop.
• Magnesium is the answer to pretty much everything that is wrong with you. You need more of it. Oh, but guess what. There are a zillion different forms of magnesium and it gets really confusing to figure out which one you need. Malate? Glycinate? Threonate? Oxide? Some make you poop, some help you go to sleep, and some help your brain and stuff. Good luck figuring out which is which, because in your 30s you have a whole tub full of magnesium supplements. You could open up a magnesium supplement store with all of your magnesium mistakes. 
• Survivor will STILL be on television. That guy who hosts it looks exactly the same. 
• The Bachelor will STILL be on television. That guy who hosts it looks exactly the same.
• You’re going to be making a lot of things with cauliflower. Things that don’t make sense. Delicious foods like pizza crust and mac n cheese and mashed potatoes will be made healthier with cauliflower. And no, it doesn’t taste good. It tastes like cauliflower, because it IS cauliflower. 
• Buy stock in Amazon. I know you don’t know what buying stock means but figure it out, and do it. Amazon will basically take over the world.
• Coconut oil is EVERYWHERE. This is especially important because you are allergic to coconut. You will get random rashes that you will have to attribute to hidden coconut and it’s super annoying. I’m just a girl standing in front of the beauty department, wishing for coconut oil to stop being trendy.

So, if you could tell your 20-year-old self about life later on, what would you say? Let me know in the comments!