Soon, I'll be 29.

Last year on my birthday, I wrote this.

I've been thinking about it all week, as I frantically ran around at work during summer training and tried my darndest to get everything on my to-do list done.

I decided weeks ago what I'm planning to do tomorrow, which consists of exactly what I did last year: dinner and drinks and karaoke with very close friends. Hopefully, the weather will hold up. (New England has had a wicked heat wave, and today the humidity finally broke with a thunderstorm.) I intend on eating dinner outdoors, so it better not fucking rain.

I even spent last weekend shopping for birthday ensembles and I'm getting my hair did tomorrow before going out.

What's interesting is that, a couple weeks ago, I wouldn't have been able to identify a significant occurrence that happened at 28, and that would have blown my whole everything-changes-every-7-years theory.

I've been working very hard for a year but most of that has been just chugging away...

But these last few weeks at work have been pretty transformative.

Here is the Reader's Digest version: My parents split when I was 3 and they shared custody of us. I hopped from house to house every week to two weeks. The issue of "home" has dominated a lot of what I do and feel and live since, then, really. At 14, my folks moved me across the country where I stayed for 8 years but never really felt settled.

After college graduation, I moved back to my childhood home, hoping somehow to reconcile an unsettled childhood and ended up being the most miserable and depressed I've ever been. I figured out that I'd have to keep searching for home and eventually ended up here, studying in graduate school and hoping to work with kids.

During my time after undergrad, I kept using the word "heal" in terms of what I was trying to do in the place I grew up. I didn't have the tools or support to get it done when I was 22. But settling into a career here, where I've been for almost 4 years, has been the most healing thing I could do for the little girl that didn't even know this is exactly what she would need one day.

I'm grateful I figured all of this out when I was still 28.

The fact is, realizing all of this has made me feel the most settled and content I've felt in a very long time.

Tomorrow, I turn 29 and who knows what this year will bring me?