February 5, 2026

Looking back at the last Five years (Ages 30-34)

So very much has happened in the last five years, the first half of my thirties.

When I turned 30, it was 2021, and I was still working at Catch The Fire Church, at the same job I had landed when I came back to Toronto 2017.

That year, 2021, the new jobs started rolling in. I got offered two positions: a news director at a radio station and a producer for the seminary where I was studying.

I took up both and worked both full-time jobs at the same time, while also completing my MDiv. I did all this for about a year.

I look back on that time and I’m amazed that I managed that! I just threw myself into it, and I guess God’s grace enabled me.

I don’t have the energy, nor the desire to work that much these days (lol).

Then in 2022, I got offered another position, as a marketing and strategy director for a new travel startup in Niagara. It was my dream job. There were so many aspects of it that were everything I had dreamt up for years.

I thought I would stay in that job for the next 10 years.

But then cracks started to show, and also, I had been planning for years to take a sabbatical, after six years working in the city.

That six years was up, and in 2024, I followed my heart and left that job to travel the world.

The Sabbatical That Wasn’t

Well, I was supposed to travel the world, slowly and long term, but instead, I crisscrossed the planet to complete a few life highlights: I trekked to Everest Base Camp in Nepal and learned to freedive in Indonesia and freedived with manta rays.

My travel was truncated partly because Tim and I started to explore a future together (and I couldn’t leave him out), and also because for better or for worse, I got the inspiration to do an MBA.

Instead of traveling for a year of this sabbatical, I only traveled for four months, and then bulldozed into my MBA. Bulldozed, because that was what it felt like in my soul.

Mid-2024, just weeks into my MBA, I wanted to quit. It seemed like a waste of money and precious time, time that I had saved for a “sabbatical.” There some rest during my MBA, but nothing like what my soul really needed. I wanted to stop studying, write about my travels and digest everything.

Tim encouraged me to finish the MBA. We got engaged. We hardly did any wedding planning until I finished my MBA in April 2025.

With only two months to go until our wedding in June, I also started a new job and spent too many evenings in tears, overwhelmed with it all.

So the first half of 2025 was a scramble to finish my MBA, find a job and plan a wedding. (I do not recommend anyone try to fit in so many life transitions like this, ever, lol.) Suffice it to say, it was all very unsettling for my nervous system.

Then we got married in June 2025 and went viral shortly thereafter. Going viral was thrilling but also rather stressful as I felt the need to keep posting on social media. I hadn’t planned to spend that much time on social media in my first months as a newlywed.

All that to say, the last five years contained a lot more upheaval than I anticipated. Changing jobs quite a few times reorganized a lot of parts of my psyche, but it has also given me a deeper confidence in who I am, what I have to offer the world, and what I am called to create with my life.

Each of those job changes refined my skillset, and gave me a greater awareness of how different companies operate.

Each of those jobs gave me a chance to get better at some part of my craft and to push myself more.

It feels a bit like… perhaps, I have scaled some pretty high peaks in the last few years, worked rather hard to complete it all, and now I stand at the other side of my latest mountain and I’m sitting on a rock, looking out at the horizon to consider where I feel called to walk to next.

Anita Wing Lee Tim Muttoo Wedding — *Tim and I got married in June 2025*

So for first half of my thirties, in the midst of all this upheaval and transition, I didn’t get to mark my last few birthdays the way I usually like, quietly and soulfully, with a large dose of reflection. Age 32, 33, 34 seemed to all fly by. There was little time for quiet writing.

There was so much happening in my outer world, I couldn’t retreat to my inner world. (Mind you, there was also a new person, Tim, with whom I probably spoke a lot of my processing outloud, instead of writing it out.)

It feels very anchoring to have time this year to really reflect on turning 35.

Integrating All the Gifts From my Twenties

There were a lot of things I loved about my twenties and I spent a lot of time missing them in my early 30’s.

Those first years after I returned to the city after travelling (ages 27-32), there was so much grief, anger, sadness, confusion. Yet now, I can look at my 20s with gratitude. I receive the gifts it gave me. I honour who I was back then. And I carry her gifts with me, into my future. (I also had the opportunity to make a podcast about it all, which helped.)

Today, I can finally look at my twenties with a sense of completion and gratitude that I didn’t have when I first wrote my blogs about turning 30. I turned 30 with a sense of wanting to hold onto my twenties, like, what happened?!

But today, I turn 35 with peace and trust. I trust that those years happened the way they meant to, and God is still weaving it all together into a grand tapestry that is being revealed.

These are parts of twenty-something Anita that I bring with me into my latter thirties, but in a more evolved form.

Traveller Anita

I loved my life of travel. I used to want it back. Before I turned 30, I think I had already been to 37 countries. This was truly the highlight of my life at that time.

I have now spent as much time travelling, as I have spent living and working in the city. 7 years each. I know the gifts that each of those worlds can bring.

Now sitting at 35, having done quite a few trips and travels with Tim, I don’t feel quite the same sense of loss. I feel more gratitude. I feel grateful that I know both worlds.

I know there is more travel coming. I know that Tim and I will spend our lives meeting people in every corner of the globe. Tim knows it too. That is all I need.

Based on my energy levels and desires, I know that travel will look different in the years ahead, but it will still be there, and it will be filled with new, wonderful gifts of a different kind.

Creator Anita

She is here to stay, and she is living more and more into her destiny and fulfillment as a creator. More importantly, I also have other parts of myself more developed, so that I don’t bank my entire identity on being a creator, as I probably did in my twenties.

It’s not just something I do, it is part of who I am and how God made me.

Even at junctures when I was going to quit being a creator and do other things with my life, it just kept coming back.

What was once a job my parents couldn’t understand, now, I almost feel like, give it a few more years, and my work as a creator will be one of the best paths I could have taken in life.

Spiritual Depth

Whereas I spent a lot of my twenties ignoring my faith, and then having to dredge through it all again in my Master of Divinity, I now feel this deep sense of peace.

To explain my whole sense of faith would take a lot of words and I’ve written it about it previously on this blog, but it colours and is the undercurrent of every other part of my life.

I know the voice that calls to me from the Deep.

I feel more spiritually alive and attuned than I ever have in life.

Perhaps like a radio that has upgraded its software and hardware, and now I can hear more frequencies all at the same time. I always hear the heavenly frequency now, and it brings energy, vibrancy, truth and music to my heart.

Life Beyond Youth

Writing all this…

I don’t feel the loss over my twenties anymore. I feel so glad that it happened. That I got to do all that travel alone, and become so much more than I was at 18.

Tim also got to spend many years traveling the world without me, and it shaped him in beautiful ways.

Now we will have a new era traveling, creating, and doing many things together, and that is such a beautiful thing!

Perhaps I have metabolized most of that grief and sadness through rereading my old blogs, and how there is space for a deeper hope and joy and sense of purpose.

I feel ok now, that the era of 20-something travel, with all of its bright-eyed optimism has passed. I bless it. I love it. I carry it with me as a talisman, not as a map. I have new navigational skills that I didn’t have in my twenties.

I don’t long for it to come back, for I know there are new and different days ahead, and I would like to live those days too.

I have another five years until I’m 40, and I feel quite certain that life will look very different then than it does today. We will see. :)

Now, as I write this, I feel gratitude for who I was. I love her. I bless her.

But I know a new Anita is emerging, and I welcome her wholeheartedly.

Even with Tim, sometimes I laugh at myself, because sometimes I want to go back to the Himalayas ASAP and trek another mountain. Other times, I just want to stay home for months and months at a time. He is happy to be around for all of it.

All these parts of Anita, and more, co-exist, and I love them all.

It is a special and beautiful thing to stand at this juncture.

Turning 35: Reflections on Entering the second half of my 30s (Part 2)

Looking back at the last Five years (Ages 30-34)

The Sabbatical That Wasn’t