When I was nine years old, I couldn’t wait to turn ten and have my age be double digits. When I was twelve, I couldn’t wait to turn thirteen and upgrade my social status from tween to official teenager. Now, I’m nineteen, my knees pop when I squat and my back has a steady ache. I’m turning twenty in February.
Two zero. Two decades. Twenty years alive.
You don’t realize how many years you’ve lived until you see how many candles end up on the birthday cake.
Do we do four groups of five candles in each corner of the cake? Do we make rows of five? Ten? Do we just put two candles on the cake where one candle represents a decade? Do we buy candles shaped like numbers? Maybe no candles at all. It’s a fire hazard at this point.
There is so much significance in turning twenty, yet it doesn’t feel like it matters at all. At eighteen we’re considered adults, but we’re still technically teenagers. It’s refreshing to leave my teenage years behind and enter a new time of my life. Being a teenager is complex. You’re simultaneously too young and too old for the general public to care about you, stuck in the purgatory of being ignored and being attacked by society. Turning twenty feels like an automatic ticket to the cool kids club. You’ve graduated from half-teenager half-adult to full-adult.
The journey out of my teen years and putting another foot into the world of full adulthood has been a melodramatic milestone for me these past few months. On one hand, I feel like I need to grieve my teenage self, release myself from my angst-ridden years, and catapult myself into full adult mode. At the same time, I tell myself there is no need to reinvent myself into a brand new person. I’m only turning twenty. I am in the middle of my college years, and there is so much time left for me to be an adult. There is so much time left for me to reinvent myself over and over again until I have run out of undiscovered personalities.
I hope, in my twenties, I will just be.
I hope that I continue to build my life. To learn how to love, be kind, how to immerse myself in the human experience, how to forgive myself. Turning twenty, for me, is not about shutting my teenage self away in a dark room. It’s about embracing those years, remembering them, but not agonizing over them anymore. I don’t want to think about how much more I could’ve done or regret the choices I made. Those years were sweet memories and now I have the opportunity to make more.
Despite my conflicting feelings, right now, turning twenty seems refreshing. Perhaps in a few years, I’ll be longing for my teenage years. Perhaps I will wonder why I was so excited to leave them behind. Although, for right now, I’m taking a minute to say goodbye to my teenage years, and happily welcoming my twenties.