Compared to other kids within my year, my birthday tends to fall towards the latter half of the school year. As a May baby, I used to watch everyone’s birthdays pass by and excitedly look forward to mine. However, this round of birthdays has a different significance as it ushers in the start of a new decade for me and many of my other friends. Maybe it is due to the commodification of being a “silly teenage girl” but I never felt any dread in aging, until now.
My birthday always tended to be a bittersweet day as a chronic overthinker with doubts about their impact on others, but I never felt scared about starting a new year. In fact, birthdays 13-19 all felt like a milestone in some shape or form. Whether it was because I was officially a teenager or I hit that sweet spot of age where I was old enough to be trusted by my parents but still be carefree, a new age meant a new experience. Now with hitting 20, it feels like the norms for how I can behave have shifted. Now, I am officially an adult and need to be more responsible.
Even though I’ll be turning 20 this year, being a “silly teenage girl” will always be a mindset. Turning a new age does not always need to signify some sort of shift. Getting into that type of mentality where we always focus on expectations or the future ensures that we don’t enjoy the current moment. Which, in a slight aside, is exactly why young kids are losing their childhood nowadays. They are so obsessed with the idea of being older, more mature, and cooler that they are not able to truly cherish their childhood. While that cycle may have also started within us from a young age, we must prevent it from continuing through adulthood. While aging is a privilege, society conditions us to believe the opposite of, we don’t have to assign major significance to it. Aging is simply a natural process and we cannot prevent it nor can we rush it, we must simply accept it.