Good morning, happy birthday, your twenties are slipping through your fingers!
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You wake up on the morning of your 28th birthday about two hours too early and in a hazy cloud of dread. It could be the remnants of any of the garden variety stress dreams that occupy your nights, but your teeth are all intact and this morning's anxiety feels a bit more foreign, a bit less tethered to such a familiar and specific source. You've been asserting throughout the past week how 100% fine and even excited you are about turning 28 — "Honestly, I keep forgetting it's even happening," or "I've heard this year is a good one," and "I feel like I've been 28 for months now" — but is it possible that you are actually, maybe, perhaps, just a LITTLE BIT freaking out about it? In a word, yes. Stay awake. You can power through this.
OK, OK, OK, so you graduated high school 10 years ago and somehow you didn't realize that until this very moment? Like, you knew it, but you didn't really know it. And you're trying to think of just one thing that happened since then, just one thing, but it is, in this moment, surprisingly difficult! BECAUSE ALL OF THE CLICHES ARE TRUE AND TIME IS FLYING PAST YOU AT AN INCONCEIVABLE AND EXPONENTIALLY INCREASING RATE AND YOU ARE BASICALLY A MILLION YEARS OLD?
Take a breath and call the people who know that 28 is, in fact, quite a few years younger than a million, and who can firmly but lovingly set you straight. Take comfort in the fact that to them, you will basically always be a child. And children have a wide world of opportunity ahead of them! Lucky you!
But the uniquely frustrating thing about this morning meltdown is that it is made up of equal, simultaneous anxieties: panic over lost youth and fear of inadequate maturity. In other words, you are, impossibly, both older than anyone who has ever lived and a toddler who has forgotten to do her laundry AGAIN. Resist it. When you make your way out of bed and shuffle through a makeshift path to the door, remember that it is sometimes necessary to prioritize your emotional well-being over the fulfillment of your daily obligations, and that that is why you chose to watch the final season of Friday Night Lights instead of cleaning your room, which is in fact evidence of your agency as an adult.
