Well, it has officially come and gone: it was my birthday on Oct. 19, and I am now officially one year older. There were the token “Happy birthday, Casey!” posts on my Facebook wall from people I haven’t spoken to since middle school, the usual texts from my best friends’ moms and half a dozen calls from family members who I had to make a few minutes of small talk with before returning to my homework. Yes, that’s right. I did homework on my birthday, because I am in college now, and that’s apparently what college students do.
I used to love my birthday. I’d look forward to it all year and then get upset when it was over. My best friend and I share a birthday, and we get an incredible amount of joy over that fact, so we’d relish our birthdays. We call each other twins, and sometimes people even take us seriously, mostly because we are both short with blonde hair and light eyes. We call each other at exactly midnight and even go so far as to celebrate our half-birthday on April 19.
One time, we just kept on forgetting to go out to dinner together with our moms and sisters (a birthday tradition) until January, but we sure as hell celebrated in January and pretended that it was our birthday all over again. It was something that bonded us, among other things, such as our also-best-friends mothers and disdain for the same people in high school.
This year, though, something was different. Perhaps it’s because it’s the first time in 19 years that Alexa and I have had to spend our birthdays apart, what with her going to school at Tulane University and me here in Boston. Maybe the time difference messed me up: Louisiana is an hour behind, so there was no simultaneous, all-caps, mutual declaration of “happy birthday” love exchanged. Maybe it’s that I spent my entire birthday in bed doing homework or that I had to hug my parents and sister goodbye as they left Boston from Parents’ Weekend. But this year, Oct. 19 felt like less of a celebration than usual and more like an admittance of defeat.
I am 19 now, hardly a watershed year. I’m still a teenager, but didn’t get any cool privileges like I did last year when I turned 18. I did not get gifts — although I did get sung “Happy Birthday,” not only once but three times at the fraternity party I was at on Saturday night, so I guess I could consider those gifts. I still have no idea what I want to do with my life, and I am still stuck in that strange, in-between, “not-quite-a-child-but-not-an-adult-yet-either” phase.
And maybe it’s the last one that’s what is really getting to me: all my life, and all everyone’s lives for that matter, we are told that we must do things solely to get to the next thing. In middle school, we needed to assert that we were ready for high school by taking the right classes and getting on the advanced track. In high school, we needed to be smart and do well in school, but also have a social life, and try to balance all of that out with extracurricular activities and leadership roles so that we could get into a good college. In college, we need to get a good GPA and build our resume and make connections so that we may hope to be successful in “The Real World.” And don’t even get me started on the amount of people who tell me that journalism is a dying art, and don’t I want to consider another major? To which I’ll always reply “No,” because I could never see myself doing anything other than writing, but that’s beside the point.
I’ve been so conditioned to worry about the next big thing that I continue to find it harder to live in the moment. Maybe my entire life I’ve been doing this whole “birthday” thing wrong, basing my happiness on and defining myself by these milestones — graduations, birthdays, first times, last times — instead of by the individual moments that are (cheesy as it sounds) what life is actually about.
We fool ourselves into thinking that happiness is “just around the corner,” but happy is not an abstract concept that we will someday reach if we do everything right. Happy is the here and the now: that feeling you get when you have a great conversation with someone and realize that they will be your friend for life, the way your heart skips a beat when someone’s name appears on your phone’s lock screen or leaving a loud dinner with your best friends having laughed and smiled so much that your cheeks burn. All of those things happened to me at 17 and 18, and they’ll happen to me at 19 and probably for the rest of my life. Happy is not a greater goal. Happy is allowing yourself to let go.
All of that being said, please: if you see me on the street, feel free to wish me a happy belated. I still do, and always will, love my birthday.
