birthdays are a funny thing, to anyone else it's just another normal day but to you it's THE day. i remember as a child, people would ask me what it felt like being a year older, and honestly it never feels different in the slightest. that's the thing with growing up, you can't pinpoint an exact day or a moment you become an 'adult' - yes technically your 21st birthday marks the arrival and celebration of adulthood, but for me, it's more of a collection of events and experiences that have given me a mature head.
all you want to do as a child is grow up, you want to eat with the adults at family gatherings. you may try on your parents shoes and clothes. you think you know what they talk about half the time. you wish childhood away and then all of a sudden you're one of them.. a grown up. but now i've hit 21 i'm not looking back nostalgically at a simpler time because there's far more exciting and adventurous things ahead of me.
i think we spend a lot of time complaining about getting older, but the way i see it is you really get the best of both: you have the challenging responsibilities a 20 something year old should have but that doesn't stop you from still embracing that inner youth. there's nothing stopping you having the same joy, fun and pleasure you would at the rip age of 8 or 9. the opportunity for play is still there if only we stopped acting so serious all the time. that's where we've got it all wrong. we've pretended to be adults all our lives and even now we have become them we don't know how to stop pretending.
maybe i say this because i'm young, but birthdays to me aren't a scary reminder that i'm ageing, it's a gentle reminder that i'm still growing, it gives me validation of where i've been and how far i've come. so here's to being 21.
Labels: 21, being an adult, birthday, childhood, future, grown ups, positive, youth
