This time around has been even more so contemplative, because as the title of this blog implies, this isn't just any birthday. This is the death of something. Something that plays a defining role in every person's life: adolescence. It is during these "teen" years I believe a person really develops who they are, and what they believe. Don't get me wrong, these things last a lifetime, but our teenagedom lays the framework. Since starting college, I have found myself occasionally looking upon young, though not much younger than me, high-schoolers and, sometimes with strong emotional force, but also sometimes faintly, longing to go back to my high-school years. But overall, I am ecstatically happy where I am now, and wouldn't trade it for a million high-school memories.
The years of being a teenager are now over for me. I've always considered myself as a "grown-up", pretty much from the time my first sister was born when I was eight years old. It seems like a laughable concept for an eight year old to feel like an adult, but this is how I was. Even when talking with my family about my upcoming birthday this year, my mother told me, "I never really thought of you as a teenager". I think somewhere deep inside of me I just always had an idea that as human beings, we should take responsibility for our actions, and the act of being a teenager, especially when you embrace being a teenager, is almost the exact antagonist of responsibility. This is all to say that, basically, I haven't felt like a teenager for years already. My twentieth birthday then, was just one thing to finalize another thing I had already felt for quite some time. To me, it was just another day, to be treated like, well, just another day, akin to my aforementioned mentality. It wasn't until this morning when I actually woke up and got out of bed that I realized how special and amazing this day really was. It was on this very day twenty years ago that I entered the world and breathed my first. This was an illuminating realization.
Entitlement is a human trend—I know it, and I know it well. It is such an easy trend for us to follow. As humans, we want to be loved and accepted, but even more than that we want to be praised and adored. Birthdays as we know them now are a perfect segue (see definition 3-noun) into that sentiment. They are a day designated and set aside for a specific person, usually with an entire day's activities revolving (again: deviated) around this person and their desires, temporarily elevating said person to godlike stature. Suffice it to say, my realization when I woke up this morning had not the slightest sense of entitlement woven into it. All I felt was humility, and a beautiful awe and respect for life. Humility because of the fact I was even given the opportunity to live in the first place, and awe and respect because the gift of life is perfection. I am writing this to give those of you with a birthday coming up, or recently passed, or if you have a birthday at all, insight and encouragement. Like I just said, being able to live is perfection. There are more politically correct ways to state this feeling, I am sure. I might be criticized by some for putting such a label as "perfect" on something that is so blatantly not, but I don't care. I am an artist, and maybe this is a feeling only artists can relate to, but I think we can all be artists. I believe we can all look at life with such respect as to say, "This is perfection. This is beauty"... If anything, a birthday should be a day where one's eyes are taken off of themselves and put onto the world around them. To be alive is a beautiful thing, and I am glad to have been born on this day, twenty years ago.
