Birthday Reflections

I think I’ve been lied to my whole life. This week I will be turning twenty-seven and I swear I’ve been fed a lie about what this age (read: entire decade) is supposed to look and feel like. At seventeen I was convinced a person’s late twenties were the true mark of adulthood. I thought I would be walking into this year of life established, centered, and with my shit together. I was sure I’d be a mother and model Christian-wife who was solely focused on raising and homeschooling her children.

Turns out as I am embarking on my next revolution around the sun, I am not those things. Somewhere about halfway through this strange decade we call a person’s 20s, I started pulling apart my belief systems. What I didn’t realize at the time is I wasn’t only deconstructing religious beliefs I was taking apart a whole damn person because those beliefs affected every part of my humanity. This was nothing short of terrifying because without all the musts and shoulds and must-not and should-nots there wasn’t much left. I spent years living in the shadow of others’ expectations of what made me good, holy and blessed. As I dug up the roots of that belief system, there was nothing left to do but replant.

There were a few core values written on my bones that anchored me as I started to reconstruct myself. My love and empathy for humanity finally had a place to flourish, free of the overhanging idea of condemnation for those who didn’t fit within a small box. I simply sat in this new found freedom for a long time mostly because I was still scared to admit to myself that I could actually live a life I found fulfilling. For the first time in my entire existence I became aware that I could simply pursue my own happiness in life without regard for a community’s ideals. Now that I had decided to be free of expectations and live a life where I had permission to disappoint everyone but myself, I had to figure out what I actually wanted.

Thursday, I’ll be twenty-seven. I am not a mother like I thought it would be. I am a college student for the second time. I sit in the classroom every week with students close to a decade younger than me, finding their footing as they set out on their first grand adventure, and I am at peace as I do the same on my next adventure. There is a need in my soul to tell stories and make experiences known. It’s been there since I was a doe-eyed eighteen year old living in a foreign country. It just took this older version of me to give myself permission to pursue this dream and see where it could take me.

I’m still in pieces, still working on putting this all back together and realizing maybe this is a lifelong endeavor called being human. In this next year of life, this messy, free version of me is pursuing big dreams and small community like my happiness depends on it…because it does.

And I will forever be convinced anyone who seems to have their shit together at twenty-seven is lying to us all.