24

Today is my last day as a 23-year-old. I’m not crying about it; I get to eat cake tomorrow! My family will call me an old man. My friends will call me an old man. I’ll call myself an old man. I can only imagine what strangers on the internet will call me. It’ll be grand!

I don’t know where the time has gone. I feel like I was just 10-years-old. Do you all realize that we’re in the year 2015? We’ve been referencing the 90s for fifteen years. Fifteen. Years.

Notice how no one ever mentions how great things were during the first decade of the 2000s? I guess we don’t like technology as much as we think we do. We’re all still reminiscing over VHS tapes and Nintendo 64.

Blu-ray never gets that sort of attention.

I think it would be cool to live until I’m 100-years-old. Why? I really don’t have a concrete answer. A birthday cake with a three-digit number on it sounds enticing. Is that a good enough reason?

Maybe I’m just curious to see what the world will be like when I’m that old. I’m assuming it will be completely different than it is now. I mean, at some point the number of Twitter and Instagram followers someone has will be completely irrelevant, right? Right!?!?

We can only hashtag and take selfies for so long.

But that’s all in the future.

When I look back on the first 24 years of my life the first thing that stands out is how many people I’ve met, or encountered. I’m including everyone from the moment I was born. The number has to be in the thousands.

I always found it amazing that I could remember hundreds of people’s first and last names, but had to really focus to remember a list of five things for an exam. Crazy how the brain chooses when to be helpful.

I’ve been pretty lucky when it comes to friends. Everywhere I’ve gone I’ve been able to make friends. Some friendships last a long time, others don’t. It’s amazing how you could be so close to someone at school, work, or even on your own street, and then you’re pulled into different directions and the friendship takes a permanent break.

That’s life, I guess. Everything changes all the time.

As I get older, I can’t help but look around me and see what other people my age are doing. It’s probably the worst thing I, or anyone, can do. All we have to do is go on Facebook and scroll. It’s terrible, really.

If you’re looking for a young adult who has their future planned out, I’m not it.

If you’re looking for a young adult who is already happily married, I’m not it.

If you’re looking for a young adult who is madly in love and can see themselves getting married within a few years, I’m not it.

If you’re looking for a young adult who is posting baby pictures on social media, I’m not it. Wouldn’t that have been a plot twist if I said I was?

If you’re looking for a young adult who knows what they’re doing at all times, I’m not it.

I can go on, but you get the point.

Do most 24-years-olds have their life together? I don’t know. I think a lot of us stay quiet. It’s not really something to brag about.

Am I worried that I’m not “it”? Sometimes. How can I not? But at the same time I remind myself that everyone’s life moves at a different pace. Just because people I went to school with are already married and in a career they love, doesn’t mean I have to be too.

Plus, as much as I joke about being an old man, being 24-years-old is still very young. I don’t need to be “it” for many things.

Our age is only a number that calculates how long we’ve been alive. I think we forget that sometimes. We all go through school with the notion that as we continue to age, we move up to something more difficult. Every year of our life is like a checkpoint. A checkpoint we achieve with everyone our age.

#TeamEffort

Then we graduate from school, enter the real world, and all of a sudden the checkpoints are different and we don’t achieve them as a group anymore.

No wonder people go on Facebook and compare themselves to others. It’s what we’ve done for most of our lives. We all moved through school as kids born in the same year. We did everything at the same pace.

Now, we don’t. This is how it’s supposed to be.

At the end of the day, the only life I’m living is my own. It moves at a different pace than yours, yours, yours, and yours. Just like your life moves at different pace than everyone around you.

Yet no matter how fast our lives go, we all age one year at a time.

Today, I’m 23.

Tomorrow, I’m an old man.

Yesterday, I was a child.