Tomorrow is my birthday, and I will be 25 years old.
Yay, happy birthday to me! I’ll be able to rent a car! And get cheaper car insurance! It’ll be a really exciting automotive year, no doubt about it.
Also, though… at 25, I will officially be (if I haven’t been already) in my “mid 20s.” I will have reached an age where it’s pretty generally accepted that I should have my $#!% together. And another thing… if you remember your elementary math skills, tomorrow my age will officially round up to 30.
I had to stop typing there for a second, because I needed a few moments to catch my breath. I stood up, paced a few laps around the room in my slipper socks, and sat back down. …And then I started freaking out some more, because DO 25-YEAR-OLDS WEAR SLIPPER SOCKS?!
I am 24 years and 364 days old, and I’m still in pajamas at 3pm on a Sunday afternoon.
Know what my parents’ generation was up to at age 25? Married. Paying a mortgage. Probably with a few mouths to feed by now.
And who’s to say it’s even generational? For that matter, if I were to survey my graduating class on Facebook, fully half of them would be married. Several with children. All with (seemingly) a defined sense of purpose.
And here I am, hours away from being a member of the Quarter Century Club, and I can’t even be bothered to put pants on if I’m not leaving the house.
There’s something about this age, something about it being TWENTY-FIVE, that has me a little shaken. It seems like just yesterday (actually, it seems like today), when 25 seemed so damned far away. 25-year-olds were just so much farther along on the maturity scale. A 25-year-old is a person who knows who they are, knows what they want out of life… or at the very least wears pants on Sunday afternoons.
And who am I? Don’t ask me, because I have no idea. It took me a solid seven months to even come up with a blog name, because the pressure of articulating my identity so definitively had me paralyzed with fear. I am not married, I don’t have kids, and god forbid I should ever be tied into a mortgage. I only very recently discovered what I want to do with my life, and have spent most of the last two years bouncing between cities.
Not to mention… the other day, I actually typed “um” in a text message. Because even when I’m given the opportunity to fully think through my responses via written word, I still find it necessary to communicate my indecisiveness.
Do you get what I’m saying here? It just concerns me that these are not traits that describe a 25-year-old adult.
Tomorrow, will I wake up with the unquenchable desire to sign a mortgage and sprout out little Susie Juniors? Seems unlikely.
Instead, I’ll probably wake up with the desire to jump out of a plane or gorge myself on Mexican food… or, more probable, just watch Spongebob in my pajamas.
Oh, 25. Come back later, would you?
The Nutshell Version 
Happy birthday – hope the day was properly celebrated (25 is most awesome)!
Pssst… I will tell you a secret. Most people don’t have a good sense of who they are until their early 30’s. And that is totally fine.