I'm Feeling 22

By Sabrina Oliveri

January has always been a month of anticipation. While everyone laments the end of the holiday season, I patiently wait for Feb. 1: my birthday.

This is not to say that I have always had enjoyable birthdays. I usually wind up crying for one reason or another. I believe you truly have not lived if you have not cried once on your birthday. However, I live for the anticipation. My Januarys are spent counting down the days until I can finally celebrate me — in a socially acceptable way, that is.

There is something dreadful and exciting about getting older. I remember each birthday less the older I get. In anticipation of my big day, I have tried to reflect on the beauty in the passage of time.

In my senior year of high school, Taylor Swift released her album Red (Taylor’s Version). A song on the album, Nothing New, was banned from being played in my car not long after its release. Not because I disliked it. The song was banned because every time I listened to it I burst into tears. The weight of being a young woman had descended upon me to a crippling extent. The song described a feeling I had never been able to articulate and can’t.

I thought I had my life planned out. College was quickly approaching, and it seemed as though the life I had been living was slowly crumbling.

However, I knew I was crafting a future I wanted to be a part of. Joy was a fleeting emotion at the time, but I knew it would not last. All I had to do was finish high school, and everything would be perfect.

If only everything was as simple as that.

While college changed my life for the better, my problems did not end when I graduated from high school. I spent the next four years piecing myself together — a very long and arduous process. Experiencing immense loss, navigating trauma, and living with chronic health issues created tumultuous times I could never have fathomed. Thus, the message in Nothing New persisted.

How could a person know everything at 18, but nothing at 22?

With my twenty-second birthday approaching, I embrace the fact that I do not know everything. In fact, I know very little about the world I am about to step into.

This is not to say that I am not an informed citizen. I read the news constantly, educate myself on new topics, and work on myself. I know a lot and simultaneously nothing at all because I have yet to experience so much of what the world has to offer.

In high school, I spent so much time planning out my life in accordance with what I knew about the world. Days were spent making assessments based on the falsehoods I had accepted as truths. Now, I know that the world will surprise me, and that is the entire point of being alive. If we could plan our lives from cradle to casket, the world would be an exhaustingly boring place to exist.

I now live to learn, not to know.

Nothing New depicted the life I was living in my last days of high school. I feared not becoming the person I wanted to be and squandering my potential, so I spent hours planning my trajectory. Hoping that if I plotted and prepared, nothing would get in the way of my plans coming to fruition. I can happily report that I am not the person I planned to become. However, the following lyrics are what still resonate with me today:

I know someday I’m gonna meet her,

it’s a fever dream...

She’ll know the way and then she’ll say

she got the map from me

I’ll say I’m happy for her,

then I’ll cry myself to sleep

My life is not what I mapped out over four years ago. If I were to meet my eighteen-year-old self, I would be happy for her. Happy that she finally escaped a tumultuous situation. Happy that she got the help she so desperately needed. Happy that she lived to see the person we became. However, I would not shed tears about taking a different path from the one she so meticulously planned. I would cry at the memory of all the pain and heartbreak that fueled her decisions.

At eighteen, I planned to escape, not to live. I wanted to prove myself, not be myself. And for that, I would sob.

Turning twenty-two, while a little scary, is extremely exciting. I have the whole world at my feet, and I have no clue where my next step will take me.

Taylor Swift was right. I do not know a blessed thing at twenty-two, and I am so glad I do not. What I do know is that I am not squandering a single second of the next year. I am greeting the next chapter of my life with open arms. No maps. No plans. Just goals.

While many people joke that the next exciting birthday is not until your thirtieth, I do not subscribe to that belief system. Every year that I get a chance to live, grow, change, and love is an exciting year. It’s not very often that we, as a society, get to celebrate life and love. I do not intend to squander it.

No, Taylor, I did not “lose my novelty.” If anything, I gained it.