Happy Virgo season, and for those of you born from Aug. 23 to Sept. 22, happy birthday! While astrology may not have much merit, I am fundamentally a Virgo. I used to reject the rigidity often associated with the sign but one look at my notes app, my Google Calendar, and my RBF had me realizing it’s a stereotype I can no longer deny.
I also happen to identify as a birthday crier. No matter how wonderful of a day I am having, the birthday blues are inevitable. It may stem from the fact that I don’t like being the center of attention, or that there’s an expectation that you should be celebrated on the day your c-section happened to be scheduled. It may also be the past birthdays that my parents forgot or the complete opposite when I spent the day on the phone talking to every aunt, uncle, and cousin. Perhaps, it’s just the fact that I’m getting older. While I know I still have much of my youth ahead of me, as I turn 20 this Virgo season, I can’t help but feel nostalgic about the end of my teenage years.
20 feels like a weird age to me. I’m nearly a year younger than most of my friends so 20 is the awkward gap of time where most of them can go to a bar and I can’t get past the door. They also already experienced somewhat of an existential crisis about being in their twenties which is now hitting me much later. There truly is no experience like being a teenage girl. As I get further into adulthood, I sometimes can’t help but feel mentally 16.
While that period of my life was four years ago, it still seems so vivid in my memories. I remember thinking that my twenties were far in the future, but the line between adulthood and childhood is thinner than you realize. It feels like yesterday I was driving around aimlessly with friends because there was nothing better to do in our town. The unintentional allnighters that came from every sleepover, getting ready together, and the debriefs that followed were the moments I savored as a teenage girl. Spending my formative years with my friends is what made our bond as tight as it is, and knowing someone just as well at 20 as you did at 14 is a special thing.
However, as we get older and live in new places, we have new inside jokes with others and can’t grab a treat at a moment’s notice like we used to. We now do our own laundry and file taxes, something that dulls that teenage girl sparkle. As special as the teenage girl experience can be, I’m glad I’m not as dramatic and rash with my emotions as I once was. As much as I cherish those memories, it’s a phase of my life that I’m now slowly exiting. At the end of the day, twenty is still so young. This is a new period of my life that I’m sure I will yearn for in my thirties. So happy birthday to all my fellow Virgos! May your birthday tears be happy ones!