Today, I Turn Twenty-Seven

It’s a big number— one my younger sisters have gagged over for the last few weeks.  

Turning twenty-seven shouldn’t be any different than turning twenty-five or twenty-six. I felt “old” when those birthdays passed by and I still feel “old” now. All of my friends tend to label twenty-seven as the start of their late twenties. However, I always thought that twenty-six was the first year you entered that stage of life. By my count, I’ve lived in my late twenties for a full three-hundred and sixty-five days now. So this year’s birthday shouldn’t feel any different— but it does. 

Turning twenty-seven is something that I’ve thought about since I was a teenager. It’s the year my mom got married and the year she found out she was pregnant with me. At twenty-seven, my mom had a glamorous career in the fashion world where she went on business trips and was gifted a Prada bag straight from Milan by her boss. At seventeen, I often thought about how adult my mom was by the time she hit twenty-seven. I memorized all of my favorite photos of her— posing in her wedding gown with the slightest bump in her belly, eating an apple at a picnic table with her hair cut short, and sniffing fresh produce in Florence. In all of her photos, my mom had the radiance that I was sure came hand-in-hand with adulthood. She didn’t hunch over like I did at seventeen. Her outfits were stylish and mature. Her skin didn’t have a single blemish. 

I remember feeling excited for the first time my future glamorous job would send me somewhere like Milan or Paris, for the clothes I would wear in my late twenties, to get married and cut my hair short. I remember thinking about how much time I had to achieve all of these things and to do it just like my mom had. At the time, the ten years that lay in between high school and true adulthood felt like a lifetime’s worth of moments away.

At seventeen, you’re so far removed from your late twenties that they become a place of fantasy. A place you dig deeper into when your college essay prompts you to disclose where you see yourself in ten years. At seventeen, I wanted to major in philosophy. I wanted to live in Paris. I wanted the guy on the football team to call me again. I wanted to move to Boston. I wanted to dye my hair. I wanted to learn a new language. I wanted to be an English teacher. I wanted to win the senior scavenger hunt and parade my victory around campus. I wanted to write a television series. I wanted my own dog. I wanted to move to California. I wanted new friends. I wanted to fall in love and have someone fall in love with me back. I wanted to live in Dublin and be the next greatest writer. 

At seventeen, I wanted everything and anything that I could think of and, in my eyes, I had all of the time in the world to achieve it. I had a list of plans scribbled into my journal that perfectly outlined the way my adulthood would play out. I didn’t feel nervous when I thought about what my life would be like in ten years because I knew exactly what I wanted, and I was going to make all of it happen. And then this morning, I woke up and realized that today was the marker of a full decade passing by.  

Today, I turn twenty-seven, and I’m having trouble processing how ten years caught up to me so quickly. 

It’s not my intention for this to turn into an essay that sounds as if I’m grieving my twenties— I’m not. So far, my twenties have been a period of loss, a ton of love, travel, new friends, education, loss again, and love tenfold. But lately, the idea of getting older has felt a lot better than the actual act of aging. The occasional gray hair on my head has come in more frequently and, at times, will bring more friends along with it. The creases by my eyes look just the slightest bit deeper. These are things that only I would notice from staring in the mirror— the same way I notice the bump in my nose, the freckle in my eye, or the way one of my teeth semi-overlaps with its neighbor. In the grand scheme of things, these little characteristics don’t mean anything. But this is the first year where I’ve seen myself in photos and truly noticed that I look like an adult, not in the way my mom had, but in a way that feels foreign to me. I expected to feel confident in my newfound adulthood. It’s almost as if I’d imagined waking up on my twenty-seventh birthday having a new wardrobe, my dream job, and clear skin and instead, I woke up with a pimple in the center of my face. 

Recently, I started working at a small gift shop in the West Village to make some extra money while I teach as an adjunct professor and push toward earning my teaching certificate. Working at the shop is not the job I had planned for myself when I was seventeen, but it’s where I’m at, and I’ve learned to love my little corner store. I love the birthday cards we sell, the candles that smell like banana bread or a library, and the Jellycats that both babies and adults squeal over. I really love that it takes me five minutes to walk to work as opposed to my hour-long train ride to the college where I teach. I’m obsessed with the twenty-year-old student I work with who fills me in on all of her friend drama. And I breathed the biggest sigh of relief when I met my twenty-six-year-old coworker who’s just trying to get her dream career off of the ground too. 

When I accepted the job at this little gem in my neighborhood, I didn’t think twice about the difficulties I would have learning the ropes or the annoyance I would feel working in retail, but the challenges came. I’m humbled every day that I’ve worked in the store by customer questions I don’t know the answers to, the lack of creative inspiration I have when trying to plan a new display, or working with a computer system that I keep mistyping numbers into. (Although, I’m not sure if that’s my age or my incompetence when it comes to simple math.) There have been mental challenges for me, too. How could there not be when I set such high expectations for myself when I was seventeen? I think this is what I’ve grappled with the most over the last few weeks. It’s been so many years since I was a teenager, but it really does feel like a single blink transported me to twenty-seven. 

Last night, I watched a TikTok that had the type of song attached to it that exudes nostalgia. As the melody ticked on, dull yellow words appeared on my screen:

There’ll be a moment when you realise you’re 27 when yesterday you were just 17; and you wouldn’t be able to tell how a decade passed away and your life got divided into before and afters. 

These lines came from a 2022 Tumblr post by poet, Ritika Jyala. I stared at them for the entirety of my morning commute and sat with the feelings this poem brought about. I thought about the before and afters in my life and how they’ve shaped me into who I am at this very moment. I thought about who I was before entering my twenties: a hopeless romantic, an introvert, quiet, obsessed with Criminal Minds. I’m still a hopeless romantic, but I know now when to pull the rose-colored glasses off. I still consider myself to be more introverted, but I now allow myself to have moments where my extroversion can shine. I’m not as quiet anymore but man, do I still love Criminal Minds. 

I took note of all of my before and afters and sectioned them off into my victories and my losses. The one goal that’s been top of mind for years now is to feel secure in my dream job. It’s something that I felt so sure, more than anything, that I’d have nailed down by the time I turned twenty-seven. But I’m working on understanding that not everything you want comes exactly when you want it— and that’s okay. 

For me, getting older is realizing that I can lend myself the kindness and patience that I would offer to my teenage self. In a recent conversation with my mom, she talked to me about getting older and the differences she noticed on her own face. 

“Look at the way this side droops a little,” she said while tugging at the skin on her left cheek. 

I watched her touch the points of her chin and nose. I watched the way she traced the lines around her mouth and how she frowned. And all I could think about the entire time was how insane it was that she couldn’t see how much more beautiful she gets every single year. How the lines she traced along the sides of her mouth hold so many memories of laughter. How the creases by her eyelashes draw attention to how brown her eyes are. How she rocks gray hair. 

When she finally stopped stretching back her skin, I told her something that I’ve been thinking a lot about lately— that aging is a gift. It’s a total cliché to say that, but the older I get, the more I start to understand almost every cliché in the book. Not everyone has the opportunity to experience what it’s like to find gray hair on their head or see the corners of their eyes start to crinkle. Not everyone gets to look back on the last decade and check off a few goals they put onto a list when they were seventeen (and maybe even add a victory or two they never thought they’d achieve). And if I can offer her that advice, why shouldn’t I offer it to myself? 

If I’ve learned anything in my early twenties, it’s that the things we want most in life take time to come to fruition. When I think of all of the things that I wanted at seventeen, I can see how those desires played out for me in ways I didn’t expect. I didn’t win the senior scavenger hunt, but I do have ridiculous pictures of me and my friends in tie-dye shirts that still make me laugh any time I look at them. I didn’t major in philosophy, but I did major in English, leading to my love for writing. I never moved to Boston, but I did move to New York City where I met my best friend. I never adopted my own dog, but I did take in a crazy cat who I now can’t picture my life without. In the last ten years, I didn’t move to Dublin, or learn a new language, or become the next greatest writer— but I still might.