Dear Seeker,

Are you well? Are you growing older? May is my birth month, and I have quite a few friends who level up around then too, but right now it is February. Who knows when you are reading this— perhaps it is your birthday. So happy birthday!

Often I feel pressured to fear aging, though I do not. Should you fear ‘losing’ your youthful good looks, or be glad to have been blessed with another year of life? If you are perceived as a woman, you are especially supposed to dread aging, and resist it— participate in anti-aging capitalism, as if buying a product can prevent your next birthday. Instead, I have been so relieved to exchange the ephemeral beauty of youth (and a lot of the negative attention it attracts), for beauty of a different kind. I am taken more seriously now, the interactions I have with strangers are less predatory, and I happily wear my wrinkles like scout badges. I have lived!

So I want to wish you a happy birthday, let you know there is nothing to fear, and encourage you to joyfully count your days like you did as a child. I starkly remember being 6… and a half— those six months were a world of difference to me. Getting older meant excitement, more experience, maturity, more chances to be yourself, to do and learn more things. Regardless of your age, this is still the case!

I could not wait to be an adult, to have all of the freedoms and responsibilities that come with that, to escape! Now that I am here, I want to revel in it, not worry if I am doing enough.

Remember how, growing up, there were distinct stages many of us went through together?

Baby, child, pre-teen, teenager— I’m a middle-schooler, I’m a freshman, ooh, I’m gonna be a senior next year! As we grew through the stages, we always knew what would come next. We enjoyed the stage we were in even as we anticipated what was to come. I didn’t cling to being a sophomore, I was going to be a junior! How strange it would have been then, to cling to one year or stage, to resist becoming a teenager, to turn sweet sixteen while wishing we could remain fifteen forever.

It sounds ridiculous— but that’s what we’re pressured into now. Hold on to 29! Dread your thirties! Forties is over the hill, death!

I think that mentality is missing something. As youths, we had all these distinct stages to grow through, but being an ‘adult’ feels like one huge stage until you die, maybe with ‘middle aged’ and ‘elderly’ thrown in.

But no— each year of your life IS distinct, IS different! It’s just, once you’re an adult, there’s too much variability between folks to specify fixed stages most people go through(though marketing will try to tell you different!). We don’t go through the same things at roughly the same times anymore. It’s up to you to figure out and appreciate what year you are going through, what stage you are in.

When we were all 17 year olds, geographically bound to where we grew up, we were still in it mostly together— we were past the age you’re allowed to start driving, right on the cusp of adulthood. But 27? Your 27 is going to look wildly different than my 27. No one’s 45 is the same. How can we possibly compare two 21 year olds from wildly different backgrounds?

As we get further from 18, we’re all following our own paths, and that can be isolating— especially with capitalism and society throwing benchmarks and life scripts at us, as if we should all be doing the same things, at the same times.

The comparisons and checklists can make you freeze up, panic! Feeling left behind means you might cling to 29— because you haven’t finished all the things you wanted to do in your twenties! Marriage, house, kids. Careers, promotions, you gotta be a millionaire by thirty! You better have lived your whole life by the time you reach thirty; otherwise, you’ll never get to it at all!

Let’s stop this madness. You are the age you are. Not on some conveyor belt or escalator, you are but thirty turns into the chess game of life, and no one has ever seen your current board state before. You haven’t had perfect control over your moves, and you have no control over life’s moves— you only have your turn. Right now. With the board as it is.

Trying to pause the game? Prevent aging? Impossible, and boring— don’t you want to play?

Playing the game in order to win? To win as quickly as possible? That’s not typically why we play games, is it?

We play games to have fun. To pass the time. To connect with others.

So play, and be glad for time passing— it gives you the agency to act, make decisions, and become yourself a little more with every turn of the wheel.

Happy Birthday, I’m glad you made it.

Your fan and well-wisher,
Aimee

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