26

I am someone who usually counts down the days until her birthday. I get excited whether there is a party or a dinner with friends or a low-key night home with some takeout and a movie. For whatever reason, it has always been something fun and something I look forward to, no matter the spectacle of it. This year, however, I completely forgot my birthday was coming up. I knew, obviously, once October hit that my birthday was just around the corner. I thought it when all of the Instagram accounts I follow were announcing it was Libra season and everyone’s captions were “I am glad to live in a world where there are Octobers”. But I didn’t realize just how close it was until a week or so before my dad asked me, “Any gift ideas? Your birthday snuck up on me this year.” Normally this might make me feel a little bad that my own father hadn’t realized my birthday was coming up, but it had snuck up on me too. His asking me was the first real thought I had of it. A week before was when my mom brought it up, also surprised it was just a week away. Why was this birthday so different from all the rest? For all of us?

I can’t really speak to my parents, and since my close friends live all over the US and the UK with the closest one being 6 hours away, they mostly didn’t bring it up until my actual birthday, and I did the same for them. But why was I so forgetful of something that I usually had a fun time celebrating? It could be as simple as 26 isn’t an exciting age. Besides no longer getting health insurance through my parents and having to figure out my own insurance, there are no new perks or fun age milestones. It is just another year of being in my 20s. It marks being in my mid-twenties, or late twenties depending on which school of thought you subscribe to (I personally prefer it being my mid-twenties still). It could be that when I brought health insurance up to my friends as something weird and something I did not feel old enough to do, most of them had already done it and hadn’t been on their parent’s insurance for a while. They have adult jobs or husbands or both so they didn’t need their parent’s insurance the way I did. 

And maybe that is the crux of it. They all have an adult job in their field, or they are married and looking to the future of buying homes and starting families and I am living with my mom and sister, not even close to where I thought I would be by this birthday. Last year I had a plan; I was going to save up enough from July of last year to July of this year and I was going to move down to the LA area and I was going to go for it in my chosen career of fashion and I was going to really give it a shot. A deluge of health conditions attacked though, and after losing my job and being unemployed for almost 6 months, I found myself living with my family again for at least another year. I have watched my friends go out there and live their lives and do exactly what they want to do, and I have only just recently fished the classes needed to finally and officially be done with my under grad degree. As trivial as it is, and as much as people will say to not compare timelines and not compare what others are doing with what you are doing, how can you not compare with where you are to your own expectations? 

Last year on my birthday, my now ex-boyfriend was here visiting for the occasion. We had a wonderful weekend and it was one of the first times I felt like potentially this was the person for me. Clearly this didn’t end up being the case and maybe that’s why things feel extra odd? A person I assumed would be in my life forever cut the cord? I am not someone who has ever had my relationship life on a timeline. I don’t want kids, and as much as I would love to fall in love and get married and have the whole fairytale, I don’t need any of it. It has never been something that was on a goal-oriented time frame like, “must be married by 30” or “my life will somehow be incomplete by 40 if I am not married and in love with a house”. But this was the first relationship I’ve had where I really could see a long-term future with this person and then that all changed. In some ways it was nice; at least I know I am capable of feelings like this, or finding a person great enough to want to spend my whole life with. But on the other it’s exhausting knowing that this can all happen and I will just be thrown into the world of dating once again. And as I’m sure most of you are aware, the pool of men to choose from these days is pretty shallow. At the end of the day, it’s probably a bummer of a combination of all of these things. It is a combination of thinking I would be in one place and finding myself in quite another. 

This is all so tricky because none of these things are inherently bad or wrong. This was a choice I made at the time to allow me to save enough money to get on with my next plans in life, and they were shot to shreds in a matter of 3 months. Again for things out of my control. It’s not like I squandered all of my money away and made a series of terrible choices, it was simply a matter of health issues that came at the worst possible time and proceeded to absolutely level me. Maybe that’s what this all comes down to: the absolute unknown and complete derailment from where I thought I would be. And everyone around me saying “Don’t compare. You are where you need to be right now. You have time.” The logic of this is correct, but it is that toxic positivity of not letting those of us in this position feel the way we feel. Saying it’s supposed to be this way doesn’t make it feel less big or uncomfortable. 

As hard and as bad as 25 was for so many reasons, and as weird as 26 has started, I think this is the year of getting it together. And maybe that’s setting myself up for failure, maybe it’s putting too much pressure on myself, but there is a feeling I have these days that I haven’t had before. It’s this burning feeling in my gut that is a now-or-never type of feeling. A feeling of not being tied to one person or house or job, just me and my cat here to live life and do what needs to be done to make things work. Maybe 25 needed to be the way that it did to light the fire under me for 26. As much as I hate the phrase “everything happens for a reason” this feels vaguely like that. This piece being all of the places with no concrete conclusion feels like the inside of my brain. Nothing is for sure the cause or reason, but maybe there is. Maybe things do happen for a reason, maybe it’s all random chance. Maybe it’s a casual sprinkling of all of it. 

And for everyone who wants to say “You’re so young you’ll get there! Give it time. Don’t put yourself on a timeline!” don’t. Because when I look back on this piece in 5 years or 10 years I will probably say all of those things and think how silly I was at 26. But for now, this is where I am at, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. 

Madey