no one's keeping score

on getting older, wasted potential, and comparing versions of yourself to one another (also it's my birthday)

artwork by Alejandro Sintura Castro

As I get older, I start to understand more and more that the act of aging is really just changing in ways you never planned for while pretending to be okay with it. I turn 24 today, and I keep telling everybody that I don’t care about my birthdays anymore, but deep down I know that’s a lie I made up to sound more grown up. My mom asks me what I’ve got set up for my special day, but I just shrug and tell her I don’t know in a tone that suggests I’ve outgrown the whole thing. But the truth is that birthdays really do still matter to me, they just don’t really feel like something worth celebrating anymore, at least not with the same eagerness and excitement I felt as a child.

When I was little, I used to start my birthday countdown a month in advance, sometimes even two. I was that excited. Every next number up was one step closer to freedom and my eventual total autonomy. But after 24 years, my birthdays have started to serve as a reminder that I should have climbed higher up by this point, like the view should be better from here. My birthdays have turned from countdowns to checkpoints where I lay out all of my wasted potential that piles up along with every year that goes by.

exactly 20 years ago today. not very amused at turning the idea of being 4.

My parents always remind me that my twenties are for making mistakes, so it’s fine that I’m making them now because it means I’m just figuring everything out, that everyone has their own path. But they get to say this with the comfortable distance of a person whose own mistakes and stupid young-adult decisions are safely boxed away and archived in decades past. I scroll over Instagram posts of friends my age getting engaged or buying homes with actual yards or announcing Baby Girl Arriving This Summer!!! and I feel a twist in my gut. I’m happy for all of them, I really am, it’s just that they’re doing all of this, and I feel like I’m doing nothing. Or like I haven’t grown up as much as I should have by now. Like I missed some sort of adulthood orientation or something.

Last year, in a post for my 23rd birthday, I wrote this:

On a regular basis, I am already ruminating on the past and how much I’ve changed, but it is particularly on special days like this when I challenge myself to really look back on exactly where I was one year prior. I like making mental lists of everything that’s different and everything that’s stayed the same. How different does my life look now? Who are the important people in my life? Who of these people were also important to me the year before? Am I any smarter or wiser than I was a year ago? Did I get hotter? What brings me joy?

I find myself making my rounds through those very same questions and mental lists again a year later, except with less curiosity and entertainment in wondering what’s changed and what hasn’t. On my last birthday, I had been in the thick of recovering from a bad breakup, so there was a lot of emotional and social introspection going on in my head. It helped to distract me from realizing any lack in progress I’d made as an adult, and served as a blanket over a small fire. But this year, there is no blanket. There’s just the fire and it’s only getting bigger. I can’t do anything but look directly at it, address it, and walk straight into it. Find the source and put it out. Last year, I wrote about looking backward, but I think all I can do is look forward now. And whenever I try, it’s always a little bit blurry, and not knowing for sure what lies ahead is what scares me most of all.

Everyone else seems to be living through their future good old days, while I’m stuck here waiting for mine to begin. Something I’ve noticed, though, is that in all of my favorite shows—all of them sitcoms about groups of young adults navigating life—the characters don’t start to actually figure anything out until their thirties. They stumble through their twenties messing up, falling for the wrong people, working jobs they hate. Their lives seem to really begin to kick off around 28 or 29, which provides some comfort for me, because I’m only 24. And what a relief it is to still be able to say that I’m ‘only’ a certain age in certain contexts.

Sometimes I’m afraid that I’m far too wrapped up in worrying about how I seem to everyone else that I’m missing what’s actually happening right in front of me, missing out on remembering what it’s like to be the version of myself that I am right now. I waste so much time just being concerned about whether or not I’m doing life right, but I just can’t help it. I’m so worried about my future and being left behind that I barely remember how to fully inhabit the present anymore. So, I don’t count down to my birthdays anymore, I just keep waiting for the day I realize no one’s keeping score. Whenever that is.

something I really needed to hear

I used to do this thing in my diary growing up called ‘future self quizzes’. These were spaced out between entries, and are kind of exactly what they sound like: every year (or every few months if I got antsy and impatient, because I love a good quiz), I’d write out numbered questions for my future self to answer, all pertaining to my current circumstances. I’d leave a space for when the quiz was written and for when it was taken, and I’d try to make sure that I took these quizzes after a good amount of time had passed. Enough time for a quantifiable amount of change to occur, at least. A lot of them would be multiple choice with quirky answer choices that I thought I was clever for writing. But there were also some questions that required a written answer, and for those, I’d leave a space for my present self to answer and then one for my future self, so I could easily compare the two periods beside each other.

Here’s an example of a page from one I’d made (and later, taken) in high school. I really wish I had a better page to show you, one that really encapsulated the essence of these quizzes, but they all have sort of private (A.K.A. highly embarrassing) information on them (sorry), so this will have to do:

you can obviously tell what year it was (2016) and how old I was at the time (15)… it’s almost painfully obvious.

If you recall the block quote I included earlier in this post of what I’d written for my birthday last year, there were a few questions listed back to back. I thought that I’d channel my old diary’s future self quizzes and simply answer some of those questions straightforwardly here, on this year’s birthday post, along with some of the basic general questions I’d always include in my old quizzes. And then next year, I’ll answer these very same questions in a birthday post, in true future self quiz fashion.

1. How old are you?

I am 24 years old today. Old enough to say something happened 20 years ago and actually remember it (insane).

3. Who are the important people in your life? Were they also important to you last year?

My family and my friends. My family is always a constant. I’m lucky enough to have them all as friends, as well as people I’m blood-related to. As for my friends, there are some people I’ve grown close with over the past year that weren’t as large of a presence in my life before, and there are people who have stuck by me through it all. I’m grateful for all of them equally. It’s not easy being around me sometimes, so I give huge props to the people who insist on doing so.

4. Are you any smarter or wiser than you were a year ago?

I’d like to think so? I thought I’d been through the wringer at 22, but 23 definitely threw me into some situations I’d never faced before. I spent the first bit of 23 trying to rediscover who I was on my own, outside of the relationship I’d been in at 22, and the rest of 23 was spent simply being the person I am on my own. I started writing prose again after being so saturated in the habit of solely songwriting. I made new friends who had never known me as part of a couple. I got closer to old ones. I think the choices I made at 23 were still stupid in their own ways, even though I was a lot more careful this time but in a lot of other ways they were a million times wiser than the ones I made at 22. I still count that as progress.

5. Did you get hotter?

I want to say yes. I think the answer is yes. But as I get older, I get more and more into the mentally deteriorating habit of looking at pictures of myself from years prior and wish I still looked like her. Unfortunately, I am knee-deep into that mindset and think I definitely looked better in 2022. My siblings and friends all tell me I look exactly the same… but I strongly disagree.

6. Do you have a boyfriend? Or a crush?

Definitely not in a relationship, but I also don’t even have a crush on anyone right now. Which is kind of insane for anyone who knows me well. I honestly haven’t even conjured up meet-cute daydreams with any hot strangers lately. Hopefully soon I’ll be back to my regularly scheduled programming?

7. Favorite movie?

My Letterboxd top 4 and all-time favorites will always and forever include Lady Bird (2017), Little Women (2019), The Social Network (2010), and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (2010). But in terms of a current, right-now favorite, I think I might have to say Bottoms (2022). I love a good buddy comedy featuring some loser best friends. If my life was a movie genre I think I’d probably fit into this one seamlessly. Some other current favorites are the pro-shot film version of the musical Waitress (2023) and obviously, Wicked (2024). I love musicals if you couldn’t tell.

8. How are you doing mentally?

I’m in a really weird place where I generally feel okay, but also not. Everything feels overwhelming but also the things I’m anxiously anticipating aren’t happening exactly right now, so all I can really do is wait. So I try to chill out and relax, but also Things Are Coming Up so I start to freak out again. Being social has also been a problem because of it, which is out of character for me, because I’m kind of a classic extrovert on the regular. The other day, I googled what traits an unhealthy version of an ENFP tends to display and I nearly crossed off every single one on the list. I’m not sure exactly what can fix me, because I thought it was just seasonal depression, but it’s March now and I should be normal already. I’ve been trying to walk and exercise more to take my mind off of things, and I think it’s helping. Writing does, too.

9. Favorite TV show?

Severance, of course. Also Abbott Elementary. I also started (and binged) The White Lotus. I’m caught up completely on all of them though, so I’ve been rewatching The Office for the first time in forever to keep me busy while I wait for new episodes to drop.

10. Current obsession?

Applying to real, actual big-girl jobs. I’ve been obsessively searching for, applying, and interviewing for so many various positions, it’s kind of insane. Here’s to hoping I find the perfect fit sometime soon. Also I’ve been turning into less of a playlist girl these days and more of a listen-to-an-album-all-the-way-through-over-and-over girl. The albums I’ve been looping are Charm by Clairo, Short n’ Sweet (Deluxe) by Sabrina Carpenter, Alligator Bites Never Heal by Doechii, and obviously the Broadway cast recording of Waitress. (Heavy on that last one this week...also fun fact, me and Drew Gehling—the guy who originated the role of Dr. Pomatter—are Instagram mutuals for some reason but I don’t question it because it’s awesome.)

11. What brings you joy?

Joy is mostly brought to me in the form of moments and experiences these days. Not so much in things I can hold and keep. When the circumstances are just right, and it feels like everyone is in just the right place. The kind of moments you wish you could just freeze in time and physically return to whenever you want, untouched and still as perfect as the last time you were there. I’ve realized though, that the entire beauty of times like these are their inability to be recreated. Time and time again, I’ve tried to recreate the magic of a certain moment but ended up feeling incomplete when my attempt fell short. So, I try to soak up these feelings and try to remember as many details as I can, so I can return to them in my head whenever I want to.

For some reason, it doesn’t feel as jarring as it has in years past to see the last digit of my age go up by one. Even though this one might typically warrant a little more fear, because being 24 means I’ve officially entered into the last year of my early twenties. But I’m not scared. Scared of falling short and being left behind, yes, but not scared of getting older. It was bound to happen eventually.

me :-)