At 27, I thought I was running out of time. Ireland disagreed.

Viktoriia Kantseva

When I was growing up in Ukraine, life seemed to come with an invisible deadline: 30. Not a birthday, a finish line. By that age, you were expected to have everything neatly arranged: a degree, a job, a husband, a child, a mortgage, a perfectly ironed life plan.

And even though everyone felt the pressure, women carried a special version of it — a quiet expectation that you must achieve everything early .. or you’ve somehow ‘missed your chance’.

I’m 27 now. According to that old logic, I should already be halfway to becoming a national overachiever. And in many ways, I did everything ‘on time’: I married young, became a mother, built a business in Ukraine, worked, learned, rushed, pushed. The only thing not checked off the list is a house but, had it not been for the war, we would probably have had one by now.

Life, however, enjoys changing our timelines without asking.

When we moved to Ireland, I discovered something almost shocking: No one here cares that you’re about to turn 30. Nobody wonders why you don’t have property yet.

Nobody raises an eyebrow about children — one, two, none. Nobody treats age as an achievement report.

Instead, people ask things like: “How are you getting on?”

“Is your daughter happy in school?”

“Are you finding your feet in Cavan?”

Age here is simply a detail. A tiny footnote, not the headline.

The first time I realised this, I felt something inside me unclench, a pressure I’d carried for years without noticing.

Ireland taught me something simple and radical: Time is not a race.

Here, people go back to education at 35, switch careers at 40, build houses at 50, start families at 38 or 42 and nobody gasps. It’s normal. It’s life.

In Ukraine, the message is: “You must succeed early.”

In Ireland, the message is: “You’ll get there when you get there.”

It’s both confusing and deeply healing.

Of course, my old Ukrainian voice still exists. It wakes up some mornings and whispers: “You’re already 27... shouldn’t you be moving faster?”

It’s not an unkind voice, it comes from a reality where life demanded speed, where uncertainty chased you, where stability was never guaranteed.

But now, Ireland has given me a second voice: softer, slower, kinder: “You’re doing grand. Life is long. There’s time!”

And these two voices argue inside me like neighbours over a backyard fence: one with a stopwatch, the other with a cup of tea. Somewhere between them lies who I am becoming.

But moving here also put us in a strange, suspended state — somewhere between home and temporary home. With the latest news about visas, statuses and unknown future rules, many Ukrainian families feel as if they are living on a gently rocking bridge: stable enough to stand on, but never fully still.

And yet — even in this uncertainty — Ireland teaches us.

Quietly, patiently, like a mother who knows that comfort isn’t always in security, but in warmth. It teaches us how to slow down. How to breathe again. How to find a rhythm that isn’t built on fear.

Sometimes I think Ireland gives us the one thing war took away: the feeling that time can be soft. And as for whether we’ll stay here forever or return home one day — that’s a story for another column.

A big one. A complicated one. For now, we’re simply here, learning how to live again.

I used to believe I had to “make it” before 30.

Now I think I just have to make it — at my own pace, with my own choices, on a timeline that belongs to me, not to old expectations.

So, if you grew up with the same pressure, here’s the truth Ireland quietly showed me: You don’t have to be finished by 30. You don’t even have to be close.

You just have to keep living — learning, shifting, becoming — in your own time.

And honestly? That feels like the first real freedom I’ve ever had.