I turn 21 in four days.
Which feels like something I should be typing with more excitement, or at least more certainty. But the truth is, I keep checking in with myself, and there’s just, well, nothing.
No big shift. No sudden clarity. Just this weird, quiet awareness that something is ending, even if I can’t fully prove it yet.
I’m still twenty. That feels important to say. Like I’m writing this from the last few inches of something I didn’t realize I was standing inside of.
Twenty-one, at least right now, doesn’t feel like a beginning. It feels like the start of an ending I didn’t get to prepare for.
Junior year is wrapping itself up in the background—finals week looming, everything feeling temporary in that specific, suffocating way—and I know what comes after isn’t just summer. It’s leaving. It’s distance. It’s choosing a fake life for five weeks that doesn’t have my parents quietly built into it anymore.
No one really tells you that part hits harder than the number itself. And I think, in a quieter, harder-to-admit way, I’m grieving my youth.
Not in a dramatic, “I’m old now” sense—because obviously, I’m not—but in the way that being young used to feel endless. Like I could do whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted, and there would always be time to fix it later.
Now, everything feels like it matters a little bit more. Decisions are starting to stick with age. Which is funny, because I really thought by 21, I would have had everything figured out.
I had a plan. A very clear, very confident plan.
I was going into education. I had that whole “ring by spring” mindset tucked somewhere in me without ever questioning it. I genuinely believed the relationships I had in high school were going to last forever. Which, looking back, feels almost sweet. Or maybe just naïve in a way I kind of miss.
I thought I’d be stable by now. Financially, emotionally, all of it. I thought I’d feel whole in a way that didn’t shift depending on the day.
And instead, I’m here. Not broken. Not lost. But definitely not finished.
Some parts of my life feel solid, like they’ve figured themselves out without asking me first. And other parts? They’re still sitting somewhere in the background, half-formed, waiting for a version of me that has more time or more energy. I keep telling myself I’ll get to them “later,” like later is a place I can actually arrive at.
Because something in me knows life is just starting.
Which might be the most overwhelming part of all of this. The idea that this isn’t the peak, or even close to it; it’s just the opening. Especially for someone who, at seventeen, was half-convinced the world might end before any of this mattered. There’s something almost surreal about realizing that it didn’t.
I made it here.
I’m about to be twenty-one, and I am going to be in another country, studying abroad, building a version of myself this summer that doesn’t exist yet.
This is the part that stays with me more than anything else.
Not the drinks I get to have, not the pictures, not the number—but the quiet, constant feeling that something is shifting under the surface. Like when you play a song on repeat, and you don’t even realize why until it’s too late to turn it off.
That’s what this feels like.
Like something is about to change, and I am just sitting here, listening to it happen before I have the words for it.
I have this version of my birthday in my head that’s loud, messy, full of people and music and moments that look good in photos. And I’ll have pieces of that, I know I will. I’ll celebrate the weekend before. I’ll laugh, I’ll go out, and I’ll probably try to hold onto my ‘youth’ longer than I should.
But on the actual day, it’s going to be quiet and reflective.
Cupcake for one. My cat is sitting too close to me like she always does. A glass of fruitscato that feels more symbolic than anything else. A FaceTime call home where everything feels exactly the same and completely different at the same time.
And for some reason, that version feels more honest. Because twenty-one doesn’t feel like a moment to me. It feels like a slow shift. Like something ending without asking for attention, and something beginning without announcing itself.
And I am right in the middle of it. not finished, not starting over, just becoming. Whether I am ready to or not.