(Title credits to our favourite showgirl, Miss Swift)
There is leftover cake in my fridge. The typography on the icing is now all wobbly. It is past midnight, and I am clearly up at an hour I shouldn’t be. When I go back to open the refrigerator door, the light falls on my face, desperate for a little sweet treat at an ungodly hour. However, as I cut myself a slice just a couple hours after the day of responding to a bazillion wishes, I find myself just staring at the unsturdy blue plate from the cabinet and the ill-cut slice placed on it. That is when it hits me, that my 21st birthday didn’t hit me at all.
I mean isn’t it supposed to be a big deal afterall? Turning legal? Finally entering the adult world? But I felt even more shrunken and nervous than ever. I try to shove these thoughts away as just regular post-birthday despondence. However, the first bite of the chocolate cake serves as an even weirder reminder that even the cake doesn’t feel different. It is from the same bakery that has been delivering at our place for the past six years. So, what is special about 21 then?
I gobble my little guilty treat in a mindless fashion, head straight for the kitchen, and just stare at the sink as the water runs and swirls over crumbs and icing residues on the plate. The running water reminds me of the fact that I have never really paused this past year. To just stare at the mundane flow of things around me. To meet the realization hauntingly close, that I have never really paused at all. Every hour of mine each year just passes, slipping in-and-out of the same two motions—hyperproductivity and hibernation.Â
When I am not chasing the next goal, I am curled up in bed doomscrolling, participating in deliberate avoidance before I have to flip the switch “on,” and rush to check off the stacked to-do list that is never ever a blank white. This night after my birthday, and just the act of staring at the running tap and the sink made me realize that all this running has to be a means to an end, in this case, rinsing the plate clean. The water has got to stop at some point. But it won’t until someone turns the tap off.
This is when it dawned on me that I was perhaps stuck in a disposition just like that running tap, oblivious to whether there is even an end to the endless outflow of energy. Every accomplishment is a quick fix, until I find the next. Every dinner with my loved ones is a meticulous plan to “catch up” and never to create anything new. Every birthday is a reservation that needs to have the correct lighting, cake with sharp candles, pictures with the perfect angles. All it is not is… a celebration. Something it is meant to be in the first place. This is why this 21st didn’t feel any different from the rest. It was the same cycle. The same running tap.
One sugar rush, quarter-life crisis, and the realization that I had wasted a good amount of water later, I finally turned the tap off. I sighed, muttering to myself “turn the tap off.”
Hey, now I know I might sound like a buzzkill who could’ve just shut up, enjoyed the cake and slept in like any sane person. There is no need to intellectualize every experience or verbalize every thought. But the very mundanity of just stopping to see, hear, and feel the water run did remind me of the immense pressure I have put on every experience without ever defining its pit stops, without ever considering the level of pressure required like the adjustable tap. It has always been a mindless spill-over in hopes of just something. That something is just a vague, vapid idea outside of myself is what I finally made peace with that night.Â
The reason why my 21st birthday didn’t hit was because it was the same, formulaic approach which despite some conjured up enthusiasm lacked one thing—intent. Like clockwork, I’ve stepped into each birthday, each new year, with shiny new shoes, fresh clothes, and curated photodumps. What really has been missing for a while has been intent. The intent to actually look around and have fun in the moment. To realize the difference between curating an experience versus straight up micromanaging. So, I switch gears for my new year’s resolution to get less anchored to achievement after achievement, title after title, and just be present in my own messy sink with intention. Maybe then, it will be fun, turning 21.