I’ve never been a crier. My emotions tend to come out in anger or passive aggression, and any feelings of heartfelt tenderness, sadness and sensitivity get bottled up rather than released through my tear ducts.
Yet, there is one day a year I can guarantee tears: my birthday. Once I passed the age of princess-themed parties with cake, pizza, a table for gifts and the entire elementary school class in attendance, birthdays were no longer an extravaganza to look forward to.
Birthdays instead bring on a bounty of negative realizations for me: my life is short and I’m probably wasting it, aging is scary and in reality, this “special day” we all hope for is as painfully ordinary as the next.
As I got older, I trained myself to stop thinking about my birthday, avoid talking about it and diminish the concept of a celebration to mitigate my eventual disappointment. I preferred to spend the day sulking and waiting for the rest of the year to resume so I could once again ignore my growing age and existence.
Still, I believed deep down that my 21st birthday would be different. Turning 21 is always portrayed as a joyous and monumental occasion symbolizing the official beginnings of adulthood, and I anticipated a day spent with friends partying, bar hopping and celebrating.
Instead, my 21st birthday was a rainy Wednesday, jam-packed with classes and club meetings, independent of my family and all of my friends who lived far away, were busy or had forgotten.
Although I received joking texts all day about hitting the club or warning me not to party too hard, much of my night was spent alone in my dorm room. Around 10 p.m. I had a momentary desire to lift my spirits, and there seemed to be no better way than heading to McDonald’s for an Oreo McFlurry.
As a young woman who has lived in both New York City and Philadelphia, I have several rules in place to ensure my safety while moving through cities, especially after dark. If I were going to head out, I would never go alone or carry my purse with me because I felt it would make me a target for a quick robbery. My technique was to jam my most important items into my shirt or my pants instead so I looked like I had nothing of value.
At Temple, I generally opted to avoid unfamiliar places off campus at night. The Broad Street McDonald’s was one of them, as I often received safety alerts from the Citizen app about robberies or fights happening at that location.
I had gotten so down about my birthday that I ignored my own rules, and I passively thought that if something bad happened it would only be the perfect culmination for a horrible day. I then set off campus for McDonald’s late at night, in the dark, all by myself, with my biggest purse in hand.
When I walked in the door, I looked at the security guard, a large man wearing slippers, getting some shut-eye at a table, and thought to myself that if anything were truly going down in this McDonald’s, we were probably doomed. Still, that didn’t sound so bad.
Soon after I got in line, a commotion broke out. A milkshake came flying through the drive-thru window at an employee, and yelling between the customers in their car and the workers inside ensued.
I could hardly make out what was going on before the customers from the drive-thru ran inside with guns and began fighting with the employees in the middle of the lobby while the crowd spread out to watch or record the altercation.
I quickly left the store and received a Citizen notification for the incident as I walked back to my room, McFlurry-less but with a new outlook on life. In reality, I know it had nothing to do with me, but in some way that fight in McDonald’s felt like some higher power was reminding me anything can happen and life can be taken away in an instant.
I thought an abnormal amount about something bad happening that night, and I told myself that I didn’t care if it did. However, once I was confronted with that bad thing, in the form of an armed brawl two feet away from where I was standing, I knew my self-pity was misguided.
I was lucky enough to return to my room unharmed, but I realized that other people are not that fortunate. My life, which I felt so ambivalent about just a few minutes before, was too precious to be spent dwelling on fear, disappointment or self-destruction.
Moping about getting older blinded me to the idea that aging is a blessing and a privilege. I decided I needed to see birthdays as important milestones, celebrating not just my life so far but what lies ahead. Each passing year is no longer a death sentence but a testament to my resilience, growth and the experiences, friends and memories I’ve fostered along the way.
I’m turning 22 in a couple of weeks, and while I can’t guarantee I won’t shed a tear, for the first time I plan to approach the day with a sense of gratitude and optimism. Life isn’t perfect or linear, but I’ve made peace with getting older, experiencing life and sharing that with those who mean the most to me.
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