35 Things I Want More of After Turning 35

There is something about turning 35 that feels different from any birthday before it.

Not worse. Not better. Different in the specific way that only a milestone sitting exactly between where you have been and where you are going can feel. You are no longer in the early, still-forming part of your thirties where everything feels provisional and changeable. But you are also nowhere near the end of anything. You are in the middle. The real middle. And the middle, when you are honest about it, is where the most important decisions get made.

As I get closer to this birthday I find myself less focused on what I want to achieve and more focused on how I want to feel. Less interested in the external markers of a life well lived and more interested in the internal experience of actually living it. Less concerned with the goals and more concerned with the quality of the ordinary days between them.

I want more peace. More adventure. More faith. More laughter. More moments where I am fully present instead of mentally somewhere else managing something that has not happened yet.

This is not a bucket list.

What's In This Post

It is an intention list. The things I am choosing to make more room for in the chapter that begins at 35. Written down here because writing things down makes them real in a way that thinking about them does not.

Here are the 35 things I want more of after turning 35.

How to Find More Peace in Your Life After 35

This is the one I want most and the one that has been hardest to access. Not because peace is complicated in theory but because the habits of a woman who spent years in survival mode are not automatically replaced by a better season arriving.

1. Peace
The kind that is not dependent on everything going well. The internal, settled, I trust this version of peace that comes from accepting what I cannot control and releasing my grip on what was never mine to manage. I have had glimpses of it. I want it as a daily experience rather than an occasional visitor.

2. Sleep
Not the collapsed, ran-out-of-fuel version that survival mode produces. Real sleep. The kind that arrives because you have genuinely wound down and your nervous system believes it is safe to rest. I want to prioritise this in a way I have not consistently managed before.

3. Simplicity
Fewer obligations that were never truly mine. Less clutter in the schedule and in the mental load that runs constantly underneath everything else. More breathing room between the things that matter so they actually have space to matter properly.

4. Patience
Specifically with myself. I extend patience to other people relatively easily. I am significantly less generous with it when it comes to my own process, my own pace, my own timeline. I want to redirect some of what I give everyone else back inward.

5. Presence
The ability to be fully where my feet are. Not managing tomorrow from inside today. Not half-present at the dinner table while the other half of my attention is somewhere else entirely. Actually here. In this room, this conversation, this moment, which is the only one that is actually happening.

Peace at 35 is not the peace of someone who has resolved everything. It is the peace of someone who has decided that she does not have to resolve everything before she is allowed to rest inside her own life.

How to Rebuild Your Faith in Your Mid-Thirties

The years of building and surviving and doing it largely alone quietly pushed prayer to the edges of my life. Not dramatically. Just incrementally, one busy season at a time, until I looked up and the distance was significant and the returning felt both necessary and awkward.

6. Prayer
Not the perfect, structured, impressive kind. The honest kind. The I do not know what I am doing but I am here and I am trying kind. Not as religious performance but as a daily conversation with something larger than myself and my own effort. I have been rebuilding this and I want more of it.

7. Faith
Trusting the process even when I cannot see the full picture. Trusting that the timeline is not wrong just because it is not moving at the pace I planned. Trusting that the distance I have already covered is evidence of something real about what I am capable of covering next.

8. Gratitude
The specific kind that is not performative. Not the gratitude that sounds right when you say it out loud but the kind that arrives in a quiet moment and makes you stop because you genuinely cannot believe how far you have come. I want more of those moments of honest, private, unrehearsed gratitude.

9. Purpose
Living from intention rather than reaction. Making choices that come from a clear sense of direction rather than from the urgency of whatever is most immediately demanding attention. I want to feel the thread of purpose running through the ordinary days and not just the significant ones.

10. Courage
The quiet daily kind. Not the dramatic everything-is-at-stake version but the courage of showing up honestly in situations that would be easier to navigate with more people-pleasing and less truth. The courage to be exactly who I am in rooms that might prefer a different version.

Rebuilding faith in your mid-thirties looks different from the faith of your twenties. It is less innocent and more chosen. More honest and less performed. I think it is more real for exactly those reasons.

How to Stop Feeling Guilty for Enjoying Your Life

This is the one that surprises me most. That after years of working toward a life I actually want, arriving in that life has come with its own particular guilt. The guilt of rest when there is always something that could be done. The guilt of joy when other people are still in the hard seasons I came through.

11. Laughter
The deep, genuine, belly laugh kind that arrives when something is actually funny and your whole body participates. I want more of those moments and I want to be present enough to receive them when they come.

12. Happiness That Needs No Justification
Not contingent on the goal being hit or the target being reached or the circumstances being exactly right. Happiness on an ordinary Tuesday because the coffee is good and the light through the window is doing something beautiful and that is sufficient reason.

13. Fun
Doing things simply because they bring me joy. Not because they are productive or build toward something or can be justified as useful. Just fun. The kind I gave myself more freely before I understood what it felt like to be responsible for everything.

14. Creativity
Creating without immediately asking whether it will generate income or justify the time it took. Writing something because it matters to me. Making something because the making is the point. I want more of that uncalculated, unpressured creativity.

15. New Experiences
The ones that make me slightly nervous before they make me proud. The things I have not done before that expand the sense of what is possible and what I am capable of and what the world contains that I have not yet encountered.

The guilt of enjoying your life after years of survival mode is real and it is not a sign that something is wrong with you. It is a sign that the nervous system has not yet received the message that the emergency is over. The joy is allowed. The rest is allowed. The fun is allowed. All of it was always allowed.

Read related post: Things I Want to Heal From Before I Turn 35

Best Solo Travel Experiences for Women in Their 30s

Solo travel changed something in me that nothing else has quite replicated. The confidence it builds, the clarity it produces, the specific joy of navigating something unfamiliar entirely alone and finding that you can, these are gifts that compound over time and that I want more of in my thirties.

16. Solo Trips
Exploring the world on my own terms and at my own pace with nobody else’s preferences to factor in and nobody else’s comfort to manage. I want more of this. More destinations. More mornings in places I have never been. More of the version of myself that only appears when I am completely on my own in an unfamiliar place.

17. Ocean Views
Because water does something to me that nothing else replicates. The specific quality of sitting near the ocean with no agenda and nothing requiring my immediate attention. The sound of it. The scale of it. The way it makes the things I was worrying about feel correctly sized against something so much larger than all of them. I want more mornings near water.

18. Spontaneous Adventures
The trip planned on a Tuesday for a Friday. The yes said before the internal risk assessment has time to produce a no. The memory made because I chose movement over hesitation. More of those and fewer carefully researched, extensively planned, fully optimised trips that leave no room for surprise.

19. Luxury Experiences
Not because I need the external validation of expensive things but because I have worked hard enough to enjoy the fruits of that work without apology. The beautiful hotel. The exceptional meal. The overwater villa that feels like it exists in a category separate from ordinary life. I am allowed to enjoy these things. That remains a lesson I am actively still learning.

20. Memories Over Possessions
Investing in experiences that compound in the memory rather than in things that occupy space. The trip is still something I carry five years later. Most purchases are not.

The best solo travel experiences for women in their thirties are not necessarily the most expensive or the most dramatic. They are the ones that ask something of you and reveal something about you in the asking. Book the trip. Go alone. Come back different.

Why Relationships Change in Your Mid-Thirties and What to Do About It

Something shifts in the mid-thirties with relationships that nobody quite prepares you for. The tolerance for connections that consistently cost more than they give drops significantly. The desire for depth over volume becomes not just a preference but a genuine need. The relationships that survive into this decade are the ones built on something real.

21. Quality Friendships
Fewer people and deeper connections. I am no longer interested in maintaining a wide network of surface relationships that require significant energy and offer little genuine nourishment. I want the small number of friendships that are real and reciprocal and honest and that make life feel less like something you navigate alone.

22. Family Time
Making memories while everyone is still here and still well and the opportunity is still present. Not postponing the visit or the call because the timing is not quite right. The timing is never going to be perfectly right. More of the time I will be glad I gave when it is no longer available to give.

23. Romance and Connection
Prioritising the kind of connection that requires genuine presence and vulnerability and the willingness to be known. Whatever form that takes in this season. I want more of it rather than less and I want to stop treating it as less urgent than the work.

24. Boundaries That Protect My Energy
Not as walls but as honest limits that communicate what I can genuinely offer rather than what the guilt is prepared to commit to. Boundaries that come from self-knowledge rather than from fear. Without the lengthy explanation and the apology that used to follow them automatically.

25. Self-Respect in Practice
Keeping the promises I make to myself with the same reliability I keep the promises I make to other people. Treating my own needs as real rather than as the thing I get around to if there is anything left.

Relationships changing in your mid-thirties is not loss. It is refinement. The connections that remain after the natural editing of this decade are the ones actually worth having.

Financial Goals Worth Having in Your Mid-Thirties

I built financial stability through years of work that I am genuinely proud of. What I am still building is the relationship with money that matches the reality of what I have created. The one that is based on what is actually true now rather than on the scarcity that shaped my earliest adult financial decisions.

26. Financial Security That Feels Like Peace
Not for status. Not for the appearance of success. For the specific peace of mind that comes from knowing the foundation is solid enough to hold the life being built on top of it. The freedom that genuine financial stability produces, making choices based on what I want rather than only what I can afford, is something I want more fully and more sustainably.

27. Freedom to Choose
More options and fewer situations where the decision is made by constraint rather than by genuine preference. I have been building toward this kind of freedom for years. I want to inhabit it more completely rather than always looking toward the next level of it.

28. Confidence in My Financial Decisions
The settled, unhurried trust in my own judgment that comes from a track record of making financial decisions and surviving the consequences of the ones that were wrong and learning from them. I have that track record. I want to lean on it more and on the fear less.

29. Growth Without the Pressure of Comparison
Continuing to build and grow without the constant self-imposed urgency that comes from measuring my financial progress against someone else’s visible position. Growth at a pace that is mine. Sustainable rather than sprint-based.

30. Wellness as a Financial Priority
Treating my health and my body with the same consistency and investment I bring to building income. The woman at forty-five is going to be living in the body and the habits the woman at thirty-five is building right now. That is a financial and a personal investment simultaneously.

The most important financial goal in your mid-thirties is not a specific number. It is the peace of knowing the foundation is real and that you are building something that compounds rather than something that requires you to start over repeatedly.

How to Stop Living in Survival Mode in Your Thirties

This is the healing work that sits underneath everything else on this list. Because none of the other things, the peace, the joy, the travel, the meaningful relationships, are fully accessible from inside survival mode. Getting out of it is not a single decision. It is a daily practice of choosing differently than the patterns that the hard years built.

31. Healing From the Patterns That No Longer Serve This Season
The people-pleasing. The financial fear that persists past the point where the financial reality justifies it. The compulsive carrying of other people’s burdens. These patterns were formed in circumstances that required them. They are not required now. I want to continue releasing them with the same intentionality I have brought to everything else I have built.

32. Rest That Is Chosen Rather Than Collapsed Into
Stopping before the exhaustion forces the stop. Resting from a place of decision rather than depletion. The quality of rest that comes from choosing it early is different from the rest that comes from running out of the ability to continue. I want the first kind to become my default.

33. Health as an Act of Love Toward My Future Self
The woman I will be at forty-five is going to be living in the body and the habits the woman at thirty-five is currently building. I want to be someone she is genuinely grateful to rather than someone she is having to recover from.

34. Balance Built Into the Architecture of the Daily Life
Not balance found only in the escape from ordinary life. A life structured in a way that the ordinary weeks are sustainable rather than something to be endured until the next holiday. That kind of balance requires different decisions than the ones survival mode trained me to make.

35. Life. Actually Lived.
Not managed. Not optimised. Not performed for the benefit of anyone observing from the outside. Actually lived. With full presence in the moments that make it up and genuine gratitude for the specific, complicated, real and remarkable life that 35 years of grace and survival and love and building have produced.

Stopping living in survival mode in your thirties is not about becoming a different person. It is about letting the season you are actually in determine how you show up rather than letting the hardest season you have ever been in continue to run the operating system.

Read relatated post: When Survival Becomes Your Religion

Life Lessons Every Woman Learns When She Turns 35

The biggest lesson arriving with this birthday is that more is not always about addition.

Sometimes more peace requires subtracting the obligations that have been producing the chaos. Sometimes more joy requires releasing the guilt that has been sitting in front of it blocking the light. Sometimes more faith requires putting down the self-reliance that has been quietly substituting for it.

What I know at 35 that I did not know at 25 is that the seasons that felt like interruptions to the life were actually the life. The hard years were not the price of admission to the good ones. They were the years that built the woman who could receive the good ones properly.

I know that the people who love you well will not ask you to disappear to prove it.

I know that rest is not the reward for productivity. It is the condition for it.

I know that my daughter watching me choose myself is the most important lesson I will ever teach her and that I do not teach it by explaining it. I teach it by doing it.

I know that time moves faster than it appeared to from the distance of my twenties and that the practical response to that knowledge is to stop postponing the things that matter. The circumstances are not going to become perfect. The time to begin is the time you are in.

Turning 35 feels less like reaching a destination and more like receiving a specific and long-overdue permission.

Permission to slow down without it meaning something is wrong. Permission to choose myself without it being a betrayal of the people I love. Permission to enjoy the life I worked so hard to build instead of always looking past it at the next version.

That permission has been available for longer than I have been taking it.

I am taking it now.

With love,

Nia

Faq

Why does turning 35 feel like such a big deal?

Because it sits in an uncomfortable and clarifying space that other birthdays do not quite occupy. You are no longer in the early, provisional part of your thirties where everything still feels like it could shift significantly. But you are also close enough to forty to feel time differently than you did at twenty-five or thirty. That combination of experience and proximity tends to produce a particular kind of honest reckoning. Gratitude for what exists. Pressure about what does not yet. Grief for things you expected to have happened by now. And a growing clarity about what actually matters going forward. All of those feelings arriving at once is what makes 35 feel bigger than the number suggests.

What if my life doesn't look the way I imagined at 35?

Most people are quietly carrying a version of the life they expected to have by this age and the gap between that imagined life and the actual one is one of the most universal and least discussed experiences of the mid-thirties. That gap does not mean you failed. It means the life you are building is different from the one you planned at twenty-two with insufficient information about what building a real life actually requires. Different is not worse. The detours produced things the straight path could not have. The life that exists is more genuinely yours than the imagined one ever was.

Is it normal to want less drama and more peace as you get older?

Completely. Something shifts in the mid-thirties for many women where the tolerance for unnecessary chaos, for relationships that consistently cost more than they give, for the performance of a version of yourself that is not quite real, drops significantly. Peace starts to feel more valuable than excitement. Depth starts to feel more valuable than volume. This is not settling. It is maturity arriving in the form of knowing what you actually want rather than what you thought you were supposed to want.

Why do I suddenly care more about time after turning 35?

Because time becomes tangible in a way it was not before. You have enough of it behind you to see clearly how quickly it moves. You can look back at the decade between twenty-five and thirty-five and feel how fast it passed and project that feeling forward and understand that the next decade will pass at the same pace. That understanding tends to produce a strong desire to stop postponing the things that matter. To stop treating the life you want as something that begins after the circumstances are better. The circumstances are not going to become perfect. The time to begin is the time you are in.