i turned twenty-two (22!) on tuesday.

birthdays are always really weird for me. i’m a huge birthday person when it comes to the people in my life, i love celebrating them and feeding them alcohol to create unforgettable nights they’ll definitely forget until next morning conversations over brunch. but when it comes to my birthday, i always have mixed feelings about it.

maybe it’s because, historically, my birthday hasn’t a great day in quite a while. i oftentimes find it shrouded in things like sadness and heartbreak and loneliness. for instance, my “sweet sixteen” (which was literally like, 8 girls taking a limo to a hibachi restaurant, drinking sparkling non-alcoholic cider) was the subject of several mean tweets that really messed with my sixteen-year old mind.

seventeen, ap exam prep.

eighteen, death.

nineteen, loneliness.

twenty, heartbreak.

twenty-one, global pandemic.

and now i’m twenty two. and i don’t know if i feel like it. i feel like i’m still seventeen and at the same time i have a hard time feeling like i’m any age at all. it’s like i’m floating in this weird realm of aging with no current propelling me any which way. i’m just existing.

on my birthday this year, my lovely team at american eagle sent me an uber eats gift card (and the incredible samantha foust sent me $20) which i subsequently spent on sushi. i used almost all of the money on the card, buying the most expensive rolls on the menu because, hey, it’s my birthday! it’s a treat!

i facetimed my boyfriend who asked me, “did you listen to 22 by taylor swift today?!” and when i responded that i, in fact, did not, he made me play it out loud from my alexa as some sort of inauguration to my taylor swift year.

“i don’t know about you, but i’m feelin’ twenty-two!”

well, taylor, i’ll tell you.

i was asked by a friend on my birthday, “how does it feel to be twenty-two?!” because that’s just a thing that people say on birthdays. hell, i say that to everyone on their birthday. it’s literally jus a thing that you say to people. but, weirdly enough, for some reason, my brain started analyzing this.

how do i feel? how am i supposed to feel? am i to feel different?

what is a twenty-two year old supposed to be like? like, do twenty-two year olds talk about the stock market and investing in 401ks? what does it mean if i still listen to the same music i did at seventeen? are twenty-two year olds too old or too young?

it feels weird to say twenty-two. twenty-one is reckless. twenty-one is the year for irresponsibility and erraticism. but twenty-one passed out, and twenty-two feels like the hangover.

i’ve been thinking about if i have felt different since i turned twenty two, if my brain grew a couple of new hairs on its chest or if i’ve suddenly acquired a taste for salads that aren’t drenched in dressing. and i realized something.

yeah, miss swift was very close to capturing my twenty-two year old essence when she said, “we’re happy, free, confused and lonely at the same time. it’s miserable and magical,” but that isn’t that far off from how i’ve felt all of my life. being a composed, emotionally-stable writer with an alter-ego of an absolute trainwreck under the cover of darkness is kind of my brand. i’ve always been trying to figure myself out.

i guess when i was asked how it feels to be twenty-two, i realized that i’m trying to figure out how i’m supposed to feel at twenty-two. the answer is, i have no clue. and i think that’s a good thing.

for all of my life, i’ve been trying to label how i feel about everything. perhaps, that’s the reason i’m so emotionally regulated (some might call it “emotionally unavailable”), i’ve spent so much time compartmentalizing how my feelings work into little boxes that i can easily identify, pull out, cure, or lock away.

sixteen, insecure.

seventeen, stressed.

eighteen, sad.

nineteen, lonely.

twenty, heartbroken.

twenty-one, weird.

so now, with this new feeling of twenty-two, i feel like just that. i feel twenty-two. and it’s a feeling only i can articulate in this word-filled, scattered brain that is all my own.

twenty-two feels like when you order your coffee black but then go back up to ask for oat milk creamer and two stevia. twenty-two feels like wearing doc martens to work and hair colors that wash out in a week. twenty-two feels like when you go to a bar crawl and find yourself constantly putting on and taking off your jacket because you can’t figure out the temperature. twenty-two feels waking up in your childhood bedroom when it’s snowing out, and you realize that home might not be so bad after all.

twenty-two is the in-between. twenty-two is impermanent. twenty-two is twenty-two, and that might mean absolutely nothing to you but it makes all of the sense in the world to me.

in a sense, it is the most me age i could be. and i’m celebrating that.

now, if you’ll excuse me, i have a 22nd birthday party to attend this evening.

oh, and it’s 2014 tumblr themed.