Just a few months ago, I celebrated my twenty-second birthday. I couldn’t help but realize how strange it was- feeling like it was just yesterday that I was sixteen and a junior in high school dreaming of college and the places after that. Now, if only I was sixteen again and wasn’t worrying about getting older and trying to get most out of life as possible.
On my birthday, people kept asking me the typical “do you feel older” question. I just laughed it off, as does anyone who doesn’t really know the best way to answer a question, But no. I didn’t feel older. I don’t think anyone ever physically feels older on their birthday…except for maybe for the twenty-first birthday when you can legally do more, but for twenty-two, no. It is just as pointless as twenty was. But, one thing I did realize: although I did not feel older, I came to the mental realization that I am getting older. It is a completely different feeling and brings on a completely different set of emotions, and possibly a few “quarter-life” crises.
I am getting older and life around me is making even more aware of that. Going back to the time of my birthday, graduation was growing near, I was packing up my student apartment, and watching my younger friends pick out their class schedules for the next year. I was officially getting into that “real-world” adulthood phase that was always looming around the corner and now it has finally crept up on me. It all seems so final.
Life during college seems to go by SO much faster than my high-school years and I feel that these quick years will become the norm. With everyday being close to a cycle and planning dates throughout the next year in my planner, it is no wonder how people get into this never-ending cycle in life and before we know it 2015 will be here in a blink of an eye.
So, with everything I have just typed out for the world to see, I am making a pact: a goal to treat everyday as bringing me something new, to pay attention to the small things throughout my day that I might not have noticed before, to wake up positively, to do my best to try new things, make spontaneous decisions, and to, overall, find my passions in life and pursue them. Because after college, there is no longer that sense of “I can do everything and try everything because I am a student taking classes with no rent, real responsibilities, or anything holding me down”. Life suddenly gets real.
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