Not-So-Happy Birthday
on turning 25
Birthday is weird. Yesterday I was 24 years old, and somehow I woke up today as 25 years old. The night turns into dusk, a day passed and somehow I got a year older. Yet, nothing much has changed. I am still the old me with my fear and insecurities. My brain can’t make it make sense. Birthday is just weird.
I remember the times when birthdays were exciting. My birthday is in July, which means when I was younger, they were always on my school break. I never got to celebrate my birthdays with friends until I was 19. I always celebrate it with my family then. My aunt used to bake me my birthday cake and I will watch her from the start until the end. It was always exciting, getting one year older. But, not anymore.
Getting older scares me a bit now. Being an adult is not as much fun as I thought it would be. Nobody ever told me exactly how it’s going to be to the point that I believe everyone never really gets everything figured out and everyone is just winging it. But everyone always has something to say about everything and everyone says many things about being 25. You have to be financially stable, they said. You have to get married, they said. You have to start investing, they said. And many other things that I have been ignoring for my own good.
There are so many things that I thought I would have achieved at 25. It’s a long list and I don’t remember most of it, but I dreamt a lot of things when I was a lot younger. I am the type of person who can not stick to one plan and would rather go with the flow, that’s why my dream often changes. But some of them are something that I would laugh about now.
I dare to say that a lot of people (at least in my country) had this thought at some point in their life, I would get married before 25. I had that thought too. Even just last year, I believed that I will actually get married sometime this year. Jokes on me, the person I thought to be the “one”, broke up with me only a few months after we start dating. Since then, my dating life got back to the roller coaster that it was. One date after another, one heartbreak after another. Just the way it was.
It’s all good though. If I learned something from the first half of this year, it’s that nothing will ever be the way you want it to be. No matter how perfect your plan is there will always be something that goes wrong in some way. But the show must go on, and you will think of a solution to fix it. You will have to compromise all the time. And I guess that’s how I will have to live the rest of my life.
I have been writing stuff on Medium for three years now and this is the third time I am writing on my birthday. I took a quick read of the two posts and they’re interesting. For the first one, I wrote something about feeling at peace on my birthday. For the second one, I wrote something about feeling blue on my birthday. This year? I’m not sure if I feel anything at all. It just feels like any other day. But it doesn’t make me feel lonely or sad. I’m just here, existing and minding my business.
Maybe the reason why I am feeling this way is that there are a lot of exciting things coming this month. I will go on a trip with my family and I will go to my favorite group’s concert. So, instead of celebrating my birthday, I am celebrating my birth month. Because why not? I am going to make this month the best month of the year as a redemption of July last year.
Happy birthday to me! I hope I can grow stronger, be better, enjoy the highs and lows, and learn a thing or two. Stay sane and stay alive!
Karanganyar, 3 July 2022
