You know how your parents and grandparents and basically anybody who’s older than you always tease you about how old you’re getting every year around your birthday?
You know what I’m talking about – the playful, yet semi-serious, “You’re getting so old,” even though you were like 6 years old at the time.
Over the weekend I turned 21 and I think it’s safe to say that there’s not really many birthdays to look forward to now.
When you’re little, you look forward to every birthday because it almost always means you get to do more cool stuff.
When you turn 13, you can finally go to the movies and see that oh-so-scandalous PG-13 movie with your friends and without your mom.
When you turn 16, you can finally get your license so you don’t have to beg and plead with your parents to take you places.
When you’re 18, you’re finally an adult who can vote and make the decision to give yourself lung cancer if you choose.
Twenty-one rolls around and you can finally go out and have a drink with friends – something I have been waiting to do for a long time, seeing as 98.9 percent of my friends are older than me. But now that I’m 21, all I can think is, “Now what?”
What do I have to look forward to now? I mean, I suppose I can mildly panic about the fact that I have to get my own health insurance when I graduate in May.
Or, I can look forward to the fact that I am less than 10 years away from being 30. Or maybe even relish the fact that I am now a “20-something” who has loads of student debt. But it’s OK, because I can drink now.
Is a quarter-life crisis a thing? Because I think I’m having one slightly prematurely. All I really want to do is build a pillow fort, climb in it and pretend like I’m still an 8-year-old who plays with Barbies and loves the Powerpuff Girls and Winnie the Pooh.
I finally feel like I actually am getting as old as everyone has been telling me, but what surprises me is how seemingly oblivious I am to it. I hear about friends getting engaged or married and having babies and my first thought is, “They’re definitely too young for that!”
But then I realize that it’s not all that uncommon for people in their 20s to, you know, live their lives.
Half of us are out getting married and having babies and the other half are stumbling around, drunk, trying to figure out where we left our phones and if Papa John’s delivers at 2 a.m.
It’s funny how elusive age is. When you’re little, you think about being an adult and you can’t quite grasp what that means, but somehow you know that you’ll have it figured out eventually.
When you actually are an adult, you still can’t quite grasp it, but somehow, you still make it work.