“It’s supposed to be fun turning 21.”
When I originally pitched the idea for this article, I was dreading turning 21. I saw it as this impending doom hurtling toward me. This precipice that I was about to jump off, but I had somehow lost my parachute along the way.
“It’s supposed to be fun turning 21.”
I was all tangled up in expectations and ideas of what turning 21 should look like. How I should celebrate it, where I should celebrate it and who I should celebrate it with? I had to get it just right. Every aspect of the day had to be perfect or else I’d regret it, right? At least that’s what I was convincing myself.
“It’s supposed to be fun.”
For as long as I can remember, it’s been this way. I’m stuck in a two-decade-long toxic relationship with my birthday. Once a year it comes crawling back, seducing me with grandiose ideas of parties and made-for-movie moments and promises of memories to last a lifetime.
And every year my birthday leaves me in the lurch. I’d get the “birthday blues” and just want the whole thing to be over. The day gave me whiplash. I’d anxiously waited 365 days only to wait for it to end once it arrived.
20 was the worst case of whiplash yet. After a year of college at home, I was in a self-imposed race against time to do things before I wasn’t a teenager anymore. I was partying all the time, sleeping with people I didn’t want to be sleeping with and digging myself even deeper than before. When I was listening to “All Too Well (10 Minute Version) (Taylor’s Version)” and heard Taylor Swift sing, “It’s supposed to be fun turning 21,” I knew that I was going to really, truly be in for it the next year.
But now that I’m here, 21 just hours away, I’m oddly at peace. This is an entirely new phenomenon for me. I’ve kind of just said f*ck it. What happens, happens. Whereas I was freaking out at the beginning of the week, desperately trying to make plans that I wouldn’t regret the day of, now it seems I’ve entered the eye of the storm. Or, better yet, that the storm has cleared.
I’ve decided to take the pressure off of myself. So what if I’m turning 21? I mean, when you think about it, this is really the last day of my 21st year, so the time to make it a great one has already passed. Oh, well. I’m blowing out the candles on another year, but I’m not torn up over it, which is a nice (albeit foreign) feeling to me.
I intend to make this next birthday different. For the last 20 years, I’ve not been a go-with-the-flow kind of girl, and I don’t expect 21-year-old me will be either. It’s okay that I will never be that girl, nor do I ever have to be, just like I don’t have to celebrate my birthday a certain way for it to matter.
We’re growing up in an economy where being seen is the most valuable currency. Documentation not only means that it happened, but that it was worth remembering. This means that if your birthday isn’t fun enough, or aesthetic enough, then it must have fell flat and you should be sad about it.
And I was. Every. Year.
Looking back, my heart breaks for that girl who couldn’t be 100% happy on a day meant to celebrate her. Over and over again she succumbed to the pressure to get it just right. And look where it got her (nowhere great, that’s for sure).
So, I’m done. That girl and I are redefining our birthday. We are breaking up with Toxic Birthday and putting ourselves out there to meet plain and simple, Birthday. One that will make us happy on our terms, ignoring social media and pop culture standards, and focusing on ours — on mine.
The only expectation I am allowing myself to have for this birthday is that it will be one for all my other past selves to celebrate, too. An apology present to the younger Guiniveres for setting them up for disappointment so many times. A laid-back, no-pressure birthday that I can be at peace with.
“It’s supposed to be fun turning 21.”
This time it will be.