Opinion | The problem with turning 21

My birthday is this week. The big birthday – 21. The birthday that’s supposed to change your life and open countless doors. The birthday that symbolizes your entrance to adulthood through the acquisition of an ID that faces horizontally.

I have been looking forward to this monumental birthday for almost three years. I’ve been ready to order a drink and proclaim “Yes, you can see my ID” since I got to Chapman. But as the day loomed nearer, rather than finding myself filled to the brim with excitement, I instead realized I was dreading it.

Birthdays stress me out. I always pretend that they don’t, but they do. And there’s a super easy explanation as to why they stress me out: the expectations. I always set my expectations too high. I strive to make my birthday appear like the ones I see all over social media, even though that’s not even how I want my birthday to go. But I feel pressured to make it look like these extremely doctored birthdays. And because I set my expectations so high – even when I intentionally attempt to lower them – I dread feeling let down. Even if I’m not let down in the end, the days leading up to my birthday are a cloud of anxious questions. What if everything goes wrong? What if no one shows up? What if everyone forgets? Illogical, maybe. But a whole day dedicated to celebrating myself creates an unrealistic, unattainable standard that I’m pressured to experience.

Not all birthdays are created equal. Last year, I spent my birthday atop the Eiffel Tower while studying abroad in Paris. On my eighteenth birthday, I spent the entire Sunday studying for an AP Government test that I was inevitably going to get a poor grade on. Fun!

But this year, I’m going in with the mindset that not everything is going to go perfectly – and that’s ok. The myth that your birthday has to be some massive, extravagant affair is just that: a myth. There’s hundreds of different ways a birthday can be celebrated and they don’t need to fit into the mold that we see and hear about so often. I don’t need to go out to a trendy club the second I turn 21 or see thousands of birthday texts right as the clock strikes midnight. It doesn’t mean I’m uncool or unloved; it just means I’m trying to fulfill an impossible standard by living my birthday like I’m in a movie. I’m not in a movie! I’m an almost-21-year-old college student balling on a budget. I have to live within the means available.

So this year, on my big, special, quite literally once-in-a-lifetime birthday, I just want love. Be that in the form of attention from everyone (the preferred method), long texts that I’ll save in the “Notes” app on my phone or literally just a hug if you see me sometime this week – anything will make me happy. I don’t need my birthday to resemble something that I don’t want it to just because that’s what I’ve been socialized to expect. As long as I’m happy, that’s all that matters.

And if something is not going perfectly on my birthday – oh well. There’s always next year.