On turning 22

I don't know about you, but I'm feeling… uh, kind of stressed out.

I turned 22 years old yesterday— November 17, same as Danny DeVito, Martin Scorsese, Gordon Lightfoot, and SNL’s Lorne Michaels. Also other people, I imagine, but they're not famous and therefore don't deserve a mention in this.

I was born a month early, which is typical of me— and I don't mean that the way Jake Paul did. Believe me.* It’s not like I wanted to come a month early, but I didn’t get much of a say. That's sorta how it always feels now— time is moving quickly, and if I’m not early, I’m late. As it turns out, adults don't have nearly as much say over their own lives as I thought they did. And birthdays don't change that.

As a kid, my birthdays were always something I really looked forward to. My parents would decorate my bedroom door before I woke up, I'd bring a birthday treat to school for my friends, some extended family and I would all go out to dinner. This year, my big plans were to catch up on work and run some errands.

Birthdays are weird for me. I think they always have been, I've just been noticing it more without all the theatrics that used to come with them. It’s like I give myself an annual check-in every time I complete my chronological orbit:

1) How productive were you this year?

2) How happy were you this year?

3) How many of your goals did you accomplish this year?

4) How did these answers compare to last year?

5) How much are you looking forward to next year?

You get the idea. I feel a similar way on New Year’s Eve, and it’s never as helpful as I want it to be. It doesn’t make me excited about what’s coming next, it makes me exhausted before anything’s even begun. Maybe that’s why I’ve felt so… feelings about my birthday this year— this felt like the first boring birthday. 18 was the first adult year, 19 was the last teen year, 20 was the first real adult year, 21 was The Drinking Year, but 22 is… just 22. So, all I’ve got is the survey. But the survey is only meant to understand, not to feel. I don’t know why I feel… this way.

The first two happy birthday messages I got today were from Disney Cruise Line and Meijer, which filled me with both a capitalistic dread and an existential fear that I don't believe were on my wishlist. But, I appreciate the thought, I guess I'll buy a cruise and some hashbrowns.

Those emails sum up the whole thing pretty well. I didn’t choose to get the emails, nor did I really decide how they made me feel. I had something thrust upon me, and I responded to it as best I could. I think that’s why the morning after my birthday this year felt more like how my birthday has felt before. I was a new age! I had a whole day ahead of me! I was tired but looking forward to it! There were no expectations, there’s no day-after-birthday mythos to live up to, so I could just treat it like a day.

In the moments before I blow out the candles each year, so much goes through my head. It makes me feel like the end of Tick…Tick… Boom! (a movie I will absolutely talk about at some point). I’m excited, exhausted, relieved, grateful, anxious, and every permutation of all of those, combined. It’s my tradition, to be emotionally confused.

But now, I apparently have another tradition— to know that I feel those things, and to be okay with them. Hyper-analyzing my feelings once (twice) a year is part of who I am now, and I’ll be ready by the next morning to find out what I’ll be reflecting on before too long. Because that’s the thing: what I’m anxious about at the start of a year is what I’ll be remembering at the end of it. So, if November 17 is the day I was born (which it is) and the day in which I look back on everything that’s happened in the last year, then maybe November 18 can become the day wherein I start to make the kind of year I want to look back on. And maybe I can modify that survey.

1) Did you make it through the year?

2) Good.

*I did not read Jake Paul's "You Gotta Want It.” I watched a Drew Gooden video.