50 Funny And Painfully True Memes That Anyone Who’s “30 And Tired” Might Understand Perfectly (New Pics)

You shouldn't feel bad if you relate to these memes, too.

When you're in your twenties and fresh out of college, you might be in some form of debt (from student loans or blowing an entire paycheck on rent) and perhaps you're also struggling to find a meaningful career. But this decade is made for mistakes, and the confusion, disappointment, and ego-bruising that come along with them. 

But when you're in your thirties, you might feel as if you're in the "adult camp", and begin to pressure yourself to figure everything out.

As writer Julia McVeigh pointed out, the permission to fail seems to have been stripped away and now is the time to reach all the traditional milestones that we associate a successful life with.

This includes — but is certainly not limited to — an impressive title to update your LinkedIn page with, a fulfilling relationship, an incredibly fun wedding; cute but undemanding children, and a house with multiple bedrooms for all of them.

Those who fail to meet these ambitious milestones may feel inadequate, especially during their class reunion where people often measure themselves against each other.

Annie Wright, LMFT, who is a licensed psychotherapist and relational trauma recovery specialist, said that she has heard some iteration of the question "Why does life feel so much harder in your thirties?" nearly a hundred times now.

According to her, being alive in a mortal body, loving other people in mortal bodies, all the while making our way in a world that requires money to pay bills and so on and so forth is hard as it is.

But she suggests that life might be even harder in your 30s for those of us who come from relational trauma backgrounds.

To illustrate her point Wright gives this example: if life is a proverbial house, built upon a proverbial foundation, those of us who come from relational trauma backgrounds nearly always have cracks in our proverbial foundations that others who come from non-trauma backgrounds do not have at all (or in greatly reduced ways).

And cracks in the proverbial foundation can make the proverbial house less sound, less stable, and more difficult to live in (so to speak).

"A relational trauma background, as I define it, is trauma that results over the course of time in the context of a power-imbalanced and dysfunctional relationship (usually between a child and caregiver) that results in a host of complex and lingering biopsychosocial impacts for the individual who endured the trauma," Wright explains in Psychology Today.

The psychotherapist said that these biopsychosocial impacts stemming from a trauma background can and often include:

• Maladaptive beliefs about yourself, others, and the world around you. For example: “I’m too broken to be loved, no one will ever love me.” Or, “No one can be trusted; everyone always leaves me," or "The world is out to get me. I have to be on guard.”
• Maladaptive behaviors to cope with intolerable feelings (feelings of vulnerability, loneliness, fear, etc.). For example: developing an eating disorder, engaging in risky sexual behaviors, becoming obsessive about work, or using substances to numb out.

As well as:

• Challenges with emotional regulation and appropriate emotional expression skills. For example: feeling easily triggered often, experiencing explosive rage, feeling a lack of feelings altogether, and being unable/unwilling to share your emotions with others.
• Attachment wounds. For example: developing an avoidant, anxious, or disorganized (as opposed to secure) attachment style in response to the non-secure relational experiences endured.

And most of us only realize how faulty our proverbial foundation is once we arrive in our 30s (and sometimes 40s).

This is because when we’re young and growing up—as a teen and young adult—our proverbial house of life, built upon whatever foundation we have, is usually a single-story house, not a multi-level house, and thus we don't feel the cracks in the foundation quite as much.

If you're still adapting to the higher stakes, check out Bored Panda's earlier publications “30 And Tired”: Instagram Account Explains Millennials In 50 Memes and 40 Funny And Painfully True Memes That Anyone Who’s “30 And Tired” Might Understand.

At least they will reassure you that there are many, many more people in the same predicament.