I didn’t really think about it. 28 felt like a milestone, because I had never planned to pass 27.
I partied way too hard on my 30th birthday though, and went into outpatient rehab a few months later, which was a turning point more than a milestone.
My thirties is when I finally grew into myself. I found my motivation, I got clean, I got diagnosed, I quit my job, finished high-school AND got a whole-ass degree, I moved to a different city and made way healthier friends, picked up a few new (and some really old) hobbies, and got a better relationship with my family.
My thirties was also painful as fuck. It took years before I found anything fun while sober. It took years to fully appreciate and embrace the quiet solid friendship of non-addicts and emotionally healthy people. I spent a lot of my thirties resigned to be bored for the rest of my life. I thought I might never truly enjoy things again after leaving the rush of emotional instability and constant dopamine fixes in my twenties…
But thinking back now I realise I finally am excited about things again. I look forward to stuff because it’s fun and intriguing and challenging! I plan meetups and events, not just because I should or it’s good for me, but because I want to! Thank you for this question, it really made me see how far I’ve come.
Some milestones are easy to see because they happen in an instant, like getting your first apartment or planning a vacation for the first time. Some milestones creep up on you and don’t have a clear time, like noticing you’re not wheezing when breathing after going uphill because you quit smoking or started walking to work or getting over a relationship ending. I don’t think any milestones depend specifically on how many days it’s been since you took your first breath. Milestones are individual, not chronological.
I use the back of paid bills, opened envelopes, receipts etc to jot down notes, phone numbers, names, dates, or todos whenever I need it (usually during a phone call or while “cleaning” or reading emails on the bus).
I keep them visible on the table or in my bag until they have been completed and then thrown them away. Or until I lose them, and if nothing bad happens it probably wasn’t that important to keep anyway. I try to transfer important notes to more durable versions, or gather todo-scraps or half-done lists into one clean list on a bigger scrap frequently.
I tried keeping notes on my phone or in a notebook, but it’s never there when I need it plus I get overwhelmed with decisions regarding organising when so many different notes need to be gathered in just one place (how do I separate work from private from volunteer-notes? What do I do with things that will be outdated in a week? Do “buy soil or make own?” really belong in the same book as “breathe, you fool!” and “monday: bus 7:37, pack bag and pee 7:20”? And how do I find the notes I need to read often among the notes I only need to real when they are relevant?)… so I just never get a good system going.