Member-only story
9 →19 →29
At the edge of 30; previous cusp birthday reflections
When I was 9…
All I could think about was I couldn’t wait until I was 10. All I wanted to be was a decade old! It sounded so grown up. It meant I got to sit at the big kid table. It meant middle school was around the corner, and so was being a teenager. I was so eager to grow up when I was younger. Maybe because I had an older sister who made it seem so cool, but also probably because the media that surrounded me showcased high school girls as pretty and popular and get boyfriends, and I was boy crazy pretty young. I tried to kiss my childhood neighbor at age 5. We settled for a hug, he was shy.
Fast-forward another decade.
At 19 I was 10x as boy obsessed, but that energy was directed at one boy at the time — I got engaged at 19 to my first true love (name omitted for privacy). He and I met in school but didn’t get together until after we both graduated, so I felt more “grown up” than I was. Again, always in a rush to hurry up and have all of the life experiences as quickly as possible. I’m not sure why I felt such an urgency to rush through life, but it’s been prevalent and innate for as long as I can remember. The rush to marry so young was simple; we were a long distance couple so we wanted to get married so we could live together…
