A few months ago, I celebrated a milestone birthday, my 30th, which prompted me to share an honest and raw reflection of how I was feeling via my Instagram account. What I posted was a heavily reduced version of my original thoughts, thanks to the word limit on the social media platform, but it’s something that I’ve wanted to share and elaborate on here for a while now, too.

If you missed it, here’s how the caption read:

This feels deeply personal, but also necessary. Here’s to entering my 30s with honesty.
Birthdays feel different these days, especially with social media’s pressure to share the curated highlights. As I enter a new decade, I feel that weight more than ever.
My 20s were full. I:
– Completed a Bachelor, Diploma + Cert III
– Started a blog + published an article
– Launched my own business
– Purchased a business with my sister
– Featured in local mags
– Moved away from home
– Lived with strangers, with friends who became strangers, and finally, on my own
– Travelled to 10 countries + all Aussie states
– Skydived, bungee jumped, hot air ballooned, became PADI certified
– Made, kept + let go of friendships
– Became a mum—twice
– Added a little extra to my last name
But it wasn’t all highs; I lost my grandparents, navigated disordered eating, birth trauma and PPA, said goodbye to people I thought would be in my life forever, and like all of us, endured a global pandemic.
From the outside, it might look like I’ve done it all—but it hasn’t always felt like enough. I’m battling perfectionism, depression, burnout, and a drive that makes it hard to enjoy my own milestones. The more I push, the higher my expectations climb.
The perfectionism has overshadowed moments that should’ve felt like triumphs. At times, I’ve felt so overwhelmed, quietly struggling behind the scenes as the voice gets louder or the feelings of failure and disappointment in myself rise. Recently, I’ve utilised Beyond Blue when it felt too much, because I didn’t know how to ask for help elsewhere.
I hold a lot of shame over the pressure I put on myself, but a resource I’ve been using taught me that “shame can’t survive being spoken.” So, I guess this is my way of acknowledging how much my unrelenting standards are impacting my life and weighing me down.
Here’s to 30, to letting go of the joy-robbing perfectionism, and learning self-compassion 🥂

This idea around failing isn’t new for me. In 2016, I wrote a whole post about the feeling.

I’ve always been someone who suffers in silence, conscious of how others might perceive me; I suppose that’s tied to my perfectionism. The trouble with keeping your reality to yourself is that it can feel incredibly lonely, especially during the harder moments. I touched on this in my grief post after my grandpa passed several years ago, but it feels as though the world keeps spinning while you’re standing still. And in today’s world, being constantly confronted with the curated highs of people’s lives on social media only fuels that sense of isolation further when your life is perhaps not as perfect as what you see online.

8 months and 5 days ago, I got married. 5 months and 6 days after that, we started couples counselling. That’s not the kind of thing you often see people sharing online. I remember telling my mum that Chris and I were thinking about going to counselling together. I was in tears—because the perfectionist in me saw it as an absolute failure. I mean, fuck, we’d only been married five months and already needed professional help?! In that moment, mum said exactly what I needed to hear: that every couple would probably benefit from counselling at some stage in their relationship. It’d probably make the world a better place. Some couples do it early on, while others might not until years down the track—but either way, there’s nothing wrong with it. Even though deep down, I know there’s nothing wrong with it—and that counselling has probably been the saving grace of our marriage, teaching us how to communicate more healthily, shout out to our therapist Sophie—I still can’t shake the feeling of being a massive failure. That’s probably why I haven’t openly shared with many people that this is the stage we’re in.

Let’s be honest—how many people would actually feel comfortable sharing something this vulnerable on their social media? Not many. And that’s another reason behind the sense of failure I’ve carried. I hate that we live in a world so heavily shaped by curated photos and videos, the kind that invite comparison whether we mean to or not. Maybe some people don’t do it now, but I’d bet every single person with access to social media has, at some stage, compared their life to what they’ve seen on a screen. I know I have—I’m guilty of it even now. As I sit here, I can’t help but think about how most people, in the early months of marriage, are still caught up in the honeymoon phase. Counselling doesn’t exactly feel like a honeymoon phase.

My social media feed is filled with posts of people travelling the world, buying houses, announcing pregnancies or engagements, and celebrating big career wins—all those milestones that radiate joy and excitement. It often feels like the rest of the world is happily spinning forward, while internally my own life feels like it’s imploding, completely out of step with the carefully curated highs everyone else seems to be showcasing. That kind of comparison can be debilitatingly lonely, because in those moments, it feels like no one else could possibly be experiencing what I am.

The thing is, social media doesn’t necessarily reflect the whole truth. Behind the person travelling the world might be someone reeling from a break-up; the one buying a house might be drowning in debt. It’s not reality—it’s a carefully curated highlight reel of only the good moments. So here I am, choosing to be vulnerable and share that while I have so much to be grateful for, I’m also very much in a low. I hope that by being honest, it might resonate with someone else and help them feel a little less isolated if they’re in a similar place.

Alongside being in couples counselling before even reaching our first wedding anniversary, countless other things are happening behind the scenes that most people wouldn’t know about. Life in our household recently has taken a bit of an unexpected turn. Without going into too much detail, Chris is off work while he focuses on his mental health. The other day, when I shared this with a friend, they were genuinely shocked that someone like Chris could be struggling. This just goes to show that you never know what’s going on for some people; everyone is fighting a battle we know nothing about. With no return-to-work date set, our future feels a little uncertain as a family that normally relies solely on Chris’s income. Financials aside, it’s also a heavy and worrisome time as the partner of someone who is struggling. I can only do so much to help Chris through this time. It’s not like tying a shoelace, where you can simply do it for someone. It’s more like taking them to buy a new pair of shoes—you can guide them, offer support, even help them find the right fit—but you can’t force them to actually put the shoes on. That in itself makes those feelings of failure rear their ugly head, because although I am supporting and helping to the best of my ability, the inner voice still whispers I should (and could) be doing more for him.

I’ve always been one for having a bit of a plan for my life. I’m not sure why, given I’ve veered off course at nearly every opportunity, nonetheless, I still have this perfect idea in my head of how my life should currently be (are we surprised?). Right now, my life is not on that perfectly planned path that 20-year-old Cartier (even present-day 30-year-old Cartier, really) imagined, and that’s ok – well, at least I’m trying to convince myself so.

I don’t know where to go from here – literally or figuratively. All I know is that I want to reduce the loneliness I’m experiencing at the moment, and the only way I see that happening is with more vulnerability and rawness. And the only way I feel comfortable doing that is through writing, so hopefully this is the start of a regular word purge. Stay tuned.