It’s a new year for me; my birthday just went by, making me newly 19. It’s always been a niche superstition that the year you turn nineteen is always awful, or “cursed.” This idea has been pushed into my head so much that I started to be afraid of turning a year older myself. I don’t want to be cursed, and I surely don’t know what’s so bad about the last year of being a teenager.
But I’ve come to the conclusion of how subjective our age really is in terms of how it relates to our age, and the act of aging itself is a double-edged sword whose beauty and function are in the eye of the beholder. I asked the many amazing women I’m surrounded by for advice on the year ahead of me, friends, families, and role models, and something they all told me without actually saying it is that it’s all about perspective.
One common curse of 19 is heartache. I was met with the advice to love myself more than anyone else, and how beauty is from the inside. I can now see that I will always be full of love and beauty, even if and when I have no one; I have myself, but also the mindset alone is what attracts those to you, and since practicing it, I have been blessed with love in many forms, all beautiful.
Another commonly discussed downside is that this is “the last teenage year” and that “my childhood is over” but I have spent the past few years in reflection and reconstruction of myself, this is the year I can enjoy everything I have worked hard for up until this point, we shouldn’t see a year going by as a death or end of an era, but a new beginning and opportunity for new levels of growth you couldn’t even reach before.
Aside from the number 19, today’s society sees aging itself as such a curse; women lose their confidence, stereotypes disrespect the elderly, and birthdays become sadder and sadder the bigger the number gets. This attitude is what gets us down. A number is all that truly changes; you control your timeline. As a society, we need to continue living our lives to the fullest until we can’t, instead of sitting around waiting for our inevitable fate.
This is my petition to end the stigma around aging being a bad thing. I want to take this next year to appreciate and enjoy all that I’ve spent my teen years working for and obtaining, and looking forward to all the new things my twenties will bring me when this year is over. I think all it takes to lift the “curse” of 19 and aging onward is just flipping your mindset.
I will be okay because I am full of love, therefore, it will surround me. I am full of gratitude for what I already have, so, the older I get, the wiser, kinder, stronger, more loving and beautiful I will get, as will you.