It’s a thing. Girls cry on their birthdays. As my 21st approached, one of my friends said to me “are you ready for the birthday cry”? It made me think, what is it about this day that is supposed to be filled with happiness and celebration that renders so many girls to tears year after year? As a child, I loved my birthday- the attention, the celebration, the presents and the sweet realisation that as each birthday passed, I was that much closer to my life finally beginning. First, I thought life began when you went to secondary school and got your first taste of freedom. Then, I thought life began when you turned 18 and left for university. Now, I find myself saying I’m excited to graduate and for life to really begin. I’m now 21 and I still don’t feel like my life has really begun, yet each year I find myself sick to my stomach at the mere thought of turning a year older, mourning the years that have passed in the blink of an eye that I will never get back.
It’s like before I knew it, with a quiet deviance, adulthood arrived and birthdays no longer felt fun. A black cloud stood on the calendar over the date, taunting me as the day got closer and closer. Gone were the days of party bags and glittery invitations, in their place stood the pressure of grand birthday plans and celebrations, and the sinking disappointment when things don’t go exactly the way you imagined they would in your head.
We set so many milestones for ourselves, most of them dreadfully unrealistic, yet we still feel the most intense self-disappointment when we fail to reach them. If younger me imagined herself as 21 years old there is so many things I have no doubt she would have expected me to do by now that I haven’t. Why do we find it so easy to fixate on what we haven’t accomplished, rather than just recognise what we have?
Aging in this society as woman is no easy feat. You can try desperately to appreciate your body simply as the vessel that allows you to enjoy this life, but each day we are surrounded by reminders that make it hard to view your body as just that, a body. ‘Men have a body; women are a body’. Typically, men are more valued for things like wisdom, experience, leadership, dominance and career achievement, which are all associated with age. Women are more valued for beauty, fertility, submissiveness and compliance, which are all associated with youth. There is no doubt that society creates an environment for women in which aging with grace is getting drowned out by the sound of Botox-filled syringes used in a desperate attempt to freeze time (and your forehead). Nonetheless, time is going to pass regardless of whether you choose to enjoy it or choose to cry at the sight of every new laughter line. It’s often lost on us that to enjoy each year as it comes is a privilege. How vain we must seem to all of those who didn’t make it to the age we are so afraid of turning.
Something that I’ve had to remind myself is you can choose to look for the bad or the good. I can choose to view my birthday has a harsh annual reminder of the years I will never get back and the milestones I am yet to meet, or I can choose to be happy and proud of where I am. I can enjoy being present in this moment instead of focusing on how many years I am away from ‘having it all’, because after all, I’m not sure that I ever will.
‘Even when I was little, I knew that teenagers sparkled. I knew they knew something that children didn’t know, and that adults had forgotten.’ There is no reason to fear the years to come, we just have to promise ourselves never to forget.