My birthday has never really meant that much to me, though that might be something I simply learned from having a summer birthday. I generally get messages throughout the entire month of July, or when August comes around and school starts up again and someone says, “Wait, you have a summer birthday don’t you? I completely forgot, happy birthday!” Especially as a middle and high schooler, the attention from the belated birthday wishes seemed to bother me more than the forgetfulness.
As a small child I was oftentimes a bit angered by the importance of birthdays. I didn’t think the day was important enough to celebrate so profusely. Every 24 hours of your life you get 1/365ths older, the day of your birthday being no different. You just got 1/365th older. I hated when I would wake up on my birthday and my relatives would ask me, “Do you feel different? Do you feel nine years old?” I would nod and appease them, but in reality all I could think about was how this 1/365th was no different from the 1/365th back in May or February. I didn’t like that this day got so much more credit when it did the same amount of work as the other days. I realize now that I was a bit intense as a child, trying to shun birthdays just because I believed the day didn’t put in enough hard work for such special treatment. I’m sure thinking that way as such a young kid shows a lot about my personality now…
Back then, I was almost always out of town for my birthday. It was July after all, and my family traveled profusely during the summers, even just little weekend trips to small towns in the midwest. Because of this, my birthday was generally a supermarket mini cake on the hotel room bed surrounded by whatever presents my parents could fit into their suitcases or the packed car. Caden used to get me a new pair of flip flops every year for my birthday. When I knew we would be out of town during my birthday, I’d purposefully leave my sandals at home, even if we were on a beach trip, in preparation for whatever flip flops he picked out this year. Then the rest of the trip, my sneakers would lay idle in the corner as I noisily flipped and flopped my way all across the new town.
I’d always loved spending my birthdays this way, and if it wasn’t for the pull of collegiate summer internships, I’d most likely still be spending them this way. There was always so much pressure when I was at home, to have a party with my friends or something more outrageous than just sitting on the bed eating prepared cake. When we were traveling it was so simple, the itinerary was already made and the only decisions I had to make were where I wanted to eat dinner and what frosting I wanted. I was telling one of my roommates a few weeks ago about not having birthday parties as a kid, how I was always out of town. To my surprise, she almost seems disgusted. Like she wanted me to get on the phone with my parents right now and confront them about the deprivation of my childhood. The way she talked to me in this sympathetic kind of voice, I could tell she wasn’t going to stop feeling sorry for me and my lack of birthday parties no matter what I said.
I remember birthday parties being this super political and petty thing during high school, middle school, even elementary school. There were multiple times where someone would invite the entire class except for one person, and the day after the party at least three people would cry in class about it. I knew I didn’t want to invite everyone in the class to my birthday if I had one, and I also knew I didn’t want anyone getting emotional at me about not getting invited as I have never been very good at dealing with crying people. So that, in addition to my general tendency to skip town all summer, means I’ve only had a total of two birthday parties in my 21 years that consisted of people other than blood (or fur) relation.
The first one was in elementary school, though I can’t quite remember the exact grade. Maybe in between 4th and 5th. I had invited over just three of my close friends to decorate cupcakes, go swimming at the neighborhood pool, then come back to my house and watch a movie. Thirty minutes into decorating cupcakes and I was already wishing for that hotel bed in a strange city.
I don’t remember exactly what made the day so horrible, but just recently I looked back through the photos my mom took on that day and the unhappiness is obvious on my face. I do remember there was an insane amount of complaining, nothing was quite right. The pool happened to be unceremoniously cold for the beginning of July, and the TV in our living room wasn’t big enough to meet 8-year-old standards. No matter the details, I refused a party for the rest of my adolescent life.
Last year was my first birthday party since. I wouldn’t exactly call it a party, more like a small gathering. I thought birthdays were uncomfortable as a little kid, but they just continue to get stranger into adulthood. I’m in a strange city where I know only five people, and I’m pretty sure three of them don’t have the slightest idea that my birthday is coming up – what do I do? Birthdays almost serve as a standardized test of one’s personal relationships at a particular point in time. At my 20-year-old point in time, I was living 6 hours away from my parents in my College Town doing an internship. I was living in a house with a girl I was friends with but not that close to, who loved celebrating things. So despite deliberately not saying anything about my upcoming birthday, of course she remembered and planned a party. I did have two close friends I was with at least three times a week that summer, Madelyn and Jaden. The two of them rallied for me, along with a small group of other mutual friends whom I also wasn’t too close with, but appreciated them being there. However, the afternoon of my birthday, my parents came up to see me, and a casual trip to get lunch ended with me having an anxiety attack in their car about internships, being a junior in college, and all those other things that come with turning an extra year older. So despite appreciating the people gathered at my house for this party, after my exhausting episode I just wanted to take a shower and get in bed.
I was mad at my parents after the anxiety attack as well. Mad at them for having perspective, and mad at myself for knowing they were right but not yet having the same perspective. Both parents let out a little chuckle when they realized my anxiety was about turning 20 years old and feeling like all the opportunities in my life were done now. Birthdays often offer a second standardized test, one of emotional state at that point in time, and I believe last summer I was in a very unstable state. I was upset about turning 20 because I felt too old to pursue my future career! A sentence I can see is comical, yet still, as an upcoming senior in college, feels all too real. Like if I would have had better internships or mentors I would get into my dream career quicker than the track I’m on now. In addition to the actual career, I also always had this obsession with being extremely successful in some category as a teenager. I don’t think I realized what a toll it would take on me to age out of my teenage years and not have that success, at least not perceived by me.
Our culture has this way of exaggerating the importance of youth to the point where even 20 year olds feel as though their life is over when they hit the two decade mark. People who don’t yet even have to worry about the external aesthetics of aging! For me, I’ve always felt this pressure that I need to ‘win’. I’m not sure where I got it from, as neither Mother Hen nor Father Rooster expect, or experience themselves, this kind of tenacious yet toxic achievement. In my mind, winning is when you do something better or faster than the majority of others, which is why I’ve always wanted to be this outrageously successful, well-traveled, and educated person at a very, very young age. Something that seems almost unattainable unless you started a monopoly at age 11 which, admittedly, sometimes I lay awake at night daydreaming about having done this. My life would be so much easier if I would have put down “Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul” in 7th grade and picked up “MBA in Ten Days”. Now I feel like the older I get, the less cool my accomplishments become. I shoot for professional sports teams, travel Western Europe by myself, write on this website, work for fashion magazines… but oftentimes I wonder how much different of a person I would be, how much cooler of a person I would be, if I had done all these things as a teenager, maybe five years ago when I was 15 instead of during my 20th year.
A day that marks a yearly milestone also means a day of reflection, and leaves me feeling inadequate with the accomplishments I’ve had in the past year of my life, because a part of me feels it all happened too late in life. Despite having a long list of accomplishments during the time in between my last birthday, I have gone through another year of adolescence without that, fingersnap, outrageous success. Or maybe I have had it, as I’m not quite sure I know what it looks like.
Knowing this is how I generally feel on my birthday, and having the awful 0/2 track record with parties, I wasn’t too interested in doing anything major for my 21st. I did have a funny idea to throw a birthday party and only invite my one other friend in NYC, and as many men from Hinge as I could wrangle. I had the image of a bunch of men showing up at an apartment, beginning to mingle with each other, just to find out every single one of them is my date.. Just me, Ada, and a bunch of men trying to court me. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the brilliant idea until too late though, and knew by that point only a small amount would show up, which wasn’t acceptable to the hilarious level, I needed dozens.
Having dozens of people that I know in one place for my birthday isn’t something I think I’ll ever be able to do. All of my friends are too successful! We’re scattered all through the country, all throughout the world. I decided to make a guest list for my dream birthday party with all of my best friends. I translated the list from names into locations in which each person currently lives:
Maine, Los Angeles, Indianapolis, Oklahoma City, Baltimore, Paris, Tulsa, San Diego, Boston, St. Louis, Madrid, Kansas City, Ecuador, New Orleans, Chicago, Winnipeg, Salt Lake City, Bogota, Long Island, Paris, Pittsburg, and Boulder. The only way we would all be together on July 2 to celebrate is if I become insanely rich and pay to fly them all out to see me on my private jet. Until that happens, I’ll just stick with not caring about my birthday and couch surfing my way around the world.
Having the people closest to me written out by their geographic locations poses a new aspect of birthdays that I hadn’t thought about before. While I do not have a lack of close, familiar relationships, I do have a lack of geographically close relationships. If I wanted a casual night with Blakely where we sip wine pretentiously and give each other long monologues of ridiculous stories that have been severely embellished, I’d have to fly entirely across the country. You can’t get much farther than New York City to Los Angeles while staying in the US. If I wanted to go clubbing like we did for Maeve’s birthday in September, I’d have to gather friends from Illinois, Louisiana, Ecuador, Kansas, and Missouri. My 21st birthday, and predictably the rest of my birthdays from here on out, are not determined by what I want to do, they’re determined by my restrictions. My restrictions for last night was only knowing one person in the city right now, Ada, who won’t turn 21 for another week (that thing about “the city that never sleeps” is only accurate if you’re over 21). My restrictions for last summer were Madelyn, Jaden, my parents, and a group of people I didn’t know that well. My restrictions for my next birthday have yet to be discovered.
There is this pressure, a societal obligation of sorts, to have a massive 21st birthday party, especially when living in NYC. As I got texts from friends and family members leading up to my birthday asking how I was going to celebrate turning 21 in NYC, it felt like this pressure was putting a negative spin on a day that is supposed to be positive.
Twenty one is one of those big, monumental birthdays. Maybe even the last one that is regarded in a positive light. There’s this rush of being 16 and getting your license, 18 and being an adult, then 21 and being able to drink. Twenty-one almost feels like the very peak of the mountain, and it’s not even close to half the average lifespan. Because the next monumental birthday is 30, but people don’t celebrate it in the same way they celebrate 18 or 21. Because there’s this idea that you’re 30, and you’re old, and the best parts of your life are behind you. It carries with it that new, weird sensation of entering the next decade. No matter how many people say, “30 is the new 20”, there’s no debating there’s a different, more negative energy placed on 30 that isn’t there at 20. Even just turning 21, I can see the valley on the other side even though I still refer to myself as a “little girl” whenever something bad happens to me. It seems as though I’ll go straight from calling myself a “little girl” to thinking “I’m old” and won’t have any time in between to just be my age.
Turning21 means my next birthday is 22 – the age I will turn the July after I graduate college. The age when I’ll have to shave off another layer of my “little girl” enigma to get a real, full-time job and find an actual place to live instead of flitting from place to place as I’m doing now. By July I should already have a job lined up for that August. By my next birthday, I’ll no longer have the luxury of cold-emailing people I think are cool just to talk with them “because I’m a student interested in their line of work.” I won’t be able to send out an email to a PR rep saying I’m doing a project for school on concert photography (completely made up) and end up with a photo pass for Louis Tomlinson two days later.
I often feel like I missed out on some of my teenage years because of my head injury and that I’m always 2 years behind everyone else. I still need time to wreak havoc as an irresponsible college student!
I have learned that I cannot look this far ahead though. With all the life I have lived in the past year, it seems impossible for me to even plan a month ahead. One month ago I had no idea where I would be living for my 21st birthday, and now here I am in a quaint little apartment in quiet Williamsburg, Brooklyn. So I must be in this moment and think of the positive things that come with 21.
Obviously, the first that comes to mind is fully being legal to drink. Being 21 opens up a whole new world just because I finally have a horizontal driver’s license. I’ve never been that much into drinking but I have always been very much into live music. I plan to actually work on a concert photography project this July, so being 21 will allow me into bars I couldn’t get access to at the wee age of 20.
Birthdays put so much pressure on people, especially when it’s a big number like 21. It’s not like I’ve changed today at 21 from what I was like two days ago at 20. Those horizontal driver’s licenses don’t come with a personality change as well. Which means I will still be bringing earplugs to clubs, turning my back on men who try to speak to me, and sneaking in my water bottle and camera – remember, if I’m drunk, I can’t get the shot!
Yours truly,
Calihan
Little Girl, Big World 
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