The night before my 20 th birthday I’m at home rummaging through the mess of my desk
drawers. As part of an existential crisis and realisation that this is my last night of being a
teenager, I decide that tonight is the best time to organise all the items I’ve quickly shoved
away in these drawers throughout the past few months. Deep into cleaning and wading my
way through piles of paper, pens and notebooks I stumble across a book of stickers. A book
of stickers that has never been used. I distinctively think back to the time of being 10 years
old, looking at the shiny and bumpy stickers thinking about how much I would love to
decorate my notebook with them, but the realisation that you only get to stick a sticker
once prevented me from ever doing so. I sat as a child thinking that today was not the day
to use these stickers, but one day the ‘perfect occasion’ will arise and then I will use them.
10 years later I’m sat looking at this book still full of stickers, without much use for princess
and dinosaur stickers today I think about how this ‘perfect time’ that I envisioned as a child
to use these stickers never happened. It is now too late. Only hours before my birthday I’m
met with the physical representation that time is slipping away much faster than I would
care to realise, and even worse the realisation that this behaviour of putting things aside
until a better time comes is not exclusive to the sticker book. In my adulthood I will delay
wearing a new outfit until I have the ‘perfect event’ to wear it for, save my perfume for the
‘perfect occasions’, and delay going to a new restaurant until the ‘perfect time’. On the
edge of true adulthood and entering my 20’s I realise I’m treating my life as a waiting game,
waiting for these ‘perfect events’ to take place but just as the sticker book showed me,
these ‘perfect’ moments typically never come.
On my 20 th birthday as I’m waving my teenage years goodbye, my friend asks me questions
to reflect on my past year and look forward to my next one. She asks me ‘What’s your
favourite memory of your nineteenth year?’, ‘What are you most looking forward to for
your twentieth year?’, then she asks me the big question, ‘Is there anything you would like
to leave behind in your nineteenth year?’. At the time I was stumped by this huge question
but ultimately, I realised that my constant search for perfectionism is what I am leaving
behind. I decide that this is the year I am taking a new grasp on life, living my life with the
new motto that, ‘If not now, when?’.
As my pre-birthday blues had been filled with anxiety of my teenage years being are over, I
realise that another year around the sun doesn’t mean I have to say goodbye to my girlhood
and immediately embrace true adulthood. Just because I’m now officially in my 20’s it
doesn’t mean I have to push the things I want to do to the side, in order to prioritise
perceived duties of a 20-year-old, like internships and work placements. Instead, I should
embrace the things I didn’t do in my childhood and teenage years, I should take the trip
because it’s exciting and buy the overpriced coffee because it simply makes me happy.
In the face of anxiety over aging, I’m going to use the ‘stickers’ today, not let them
accumulate in the drawer for another 10 years.