I Decided to Live Until 30 and Then Die. Here's What Happened Instead.

I'm going to tell you something I don't usually say out loud.

When I was in my twenties, I had a plan: live until thirty, then die. Not dramatically. Just as a practical deadline. By thirty, I thought, if I still haven't managed to do anything real with my life, I'll stop trying.

I grew up at my grandmother's house. She was a woman of almost no words — she made sure I didn't starve and that I used the bathroom. That was the full extent of our communication. For years, my main social relationships were with drainage ditches and the insects inside them. I built them tiny houses. I explained to them how to walk.

This is not a metaphor. I was a very strange child.

What Paris Did

When I got to Paris to study luxury design, I was finally around people who understood the particular kind of strangeness I was.

I had a roommate named Lydia. She also carried a heavy sense of death — hers came out differently. She read the same thick CAF administrative books three times, not to pass exams, but to inflate her score and push the average up, so fewer people could pass. She ate the same flavor of pizza every single day.

One afternoon I told her my plan.

"I want to do something grand and intense, fully experience life, then die at thirty."

She looked at me for a moment.

"Have you done anything specific yet that could make your life grand and intense?"

I thought about it.

No.

"Then," she said, with the calm logic of someone who has also thought about this too much, "you probably can't accomplish what you want by thirty. Which means you don't have grounds to die yet."

I have never received better advice in my life.

What Changed

I didn't fix anything quickly. It took years. It's still a process.

But something my friend Gaëlle said stayed with me. She told me that when she was young, she genuinely didn't understand things either. Only after enough time accumulated did they get easier.

The solution is the accumulation laid down by time.

I'm in my thirties now. I still have many ideas every day — just like when I was three, talking to insects. The difference is that now, some of them can actually be realized. My ability to solve problems has slowly improved. The gap between "I want to do this" and "I can do this" has narrowed.

Fairies Whisper is one of the things that actually got realized. If you want to understand how Paris and China turned into a jewelry brand, that story is worth reading too.

Why I'm Telling You This

I don't share this to perform vulnerability or to make my brand seem interesting.

I share it because I think there's a particular kind of woman who buys from me.

She's not naive. She's been through things. She knows the difference between being told something is valuable and actually feeling that it is. She's figured out that the most important investment she can make is in herself — her skills, her clarity, her ability to create and decide and move.

She wants beautiful things in her life, but she's also practical. She knows that a $20 earring that makes her feel like herself is worth more than a $2,000 earring she's afraid to wear. She also knows which earring shapes actually work for her face — because she's done the research.

That's who I make things for. That's who I am.

If you've read this far, you probably recognize something here.

Made for Women Who Have Figured Some Things Out

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Ren — founder of Fairies Whisper, former Paris design student, former insect architect.