Every year I get this feeling, that growing one year older is another wasted. I have never felt the age that my annual date of birth declares I am, as if the last ten or so years have been stolen from me and I am trying to catch up with everyone else my age. This year however I feel a definite change. It feels so alien to note experience that feeling, for the first time in far too many birthdays to count.
At the start of the year my necklace broke. It was one that I had worn pretty much every day without taking it off once. I had worn it with every outfit, showered with it on and put it through its paces yet inexplicably the chain broke without any force or stress to it.
I have always been a little superstitious so naturally I looked up to see if there was any meaning behind it and of course the google gods didn’t let me down.
When jewellery with significance breaks, it means that it has absorbed all the energy it needed to and its job is fulfilled.
I started wearing this necklace during a negative time of my life, when I was uncertain of myself and I didn’t feel in control of myself as an individual. It has almost been an anchor, the little R pendant a reminder of my identity, who I was and looking back now I see how much of a fight it was to keep reminding myself and getting it to stick in my head that I am my own person with my own agency and conviction. This time last year I was still somewhat in that place and 2024 had been spent getting as far away from that as possible.
I remember my 23rd birthday, feeling quite robbed, self-realisation of how lost I had been had hit me and I spent the entire day with that dark feeling swamping me more than it had ever before. Now it’s 2025, a whole year later yet that birthday feels a lifetime ago, like I am now, an entirely different person. Almost like the one I had always wanted and hoped to be.
People always make such a big deal about their sixteenth, eighteenth and twentieth birthday, as if they are supposed to have everything figured out by then. Maybe some do but I certainly didn’t. The leap between 23 and 24 feels vaster than the one from ten years old to twenty. In a year I feel like I have grown and discovered more about myself than I previously had ever known.
If I told myself a year ago that on my 24th birthday I would feel finally myself, finally confident in my skin and ready to take on the rest of my life, I would’ve believed the current me to be absolutely bonkers!
Even putting these thoughts out into the world for others to see I wouldn’t have dreamt of out of fear of I don’t even know what. Rejection? humiliation? I had kept my voice quiet for so long I almost forgot that I could raise it. I have taken the step into the unknown finally and I have now arrived at the fact that I have a voice I want to be heard. I hope someone out there is listening, yet even if no one reads this or reads it and thinks it’s just ramblings of no consequence it doesn’t matter because it is me being my most authentic me at last. I have grown, I have healed and here I am stepping into my 24th year! Happy birthday to me.
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