Captain's Log, Day 31: Oh, 25 Years Old / Oh How Am I to Know? (A Quarantine Birthday)

Date: March 1, 2021

Time of post: 4:15 PM

Quarantine Day: 341

Last Song I Listened To: “We Are Young” –Little Mix’scover

Last Person I Communicated With: Mikayla Sharpless

Last Thing I Ate: a coconut pecan cookie

Last Thing I Read: fanfic last night

Current Mood: I’m itching to be productive

One Thing I’ve Accomplished Today: I spent all day yesterday redoing my dad’s CV because he’s applying for an award, and I wanted his CV to look better than everyone else’s

One Thing I Want To Accomplish Today: a ChLA abstract, because I’ve committed to that now lol

One Reason I’m Stressed Today: I need to write a letter of intent so I can keep my instructor job, and I really hate those

One Reason I’m Happy Today: Mikayla organized a surprise Zoom party for me on Friday night! I thought it was going to be just us playing the Taylor Swift game I made her for her birthday, but then she surprised me with Jacque, Lexi, Dustin, Noelle, and Molly! It was so nice!

“Oh, 25 years old / Oh, how were you to know?”

 –Taylor Swift, “Dancing With Our Hands Tied”

Dear Apocalypsers,

I meant to post on my birthday, the 25^th, but I got caught up in the festivities and didn’t get a post written. And I wanted it to be good. I wanted to take the time to do it right.

I turned 25 on Thursday. In undergrad, my friend Baby Katie told me that the day that you turn the same age as the date is your “Super Birthday.” So, I guess it was my Super Birthday, which is pretty cool—and it wasn’t extravagant, but it was still pretty super.

My birthday is the one day a year when I don’t mind everything being about me. Don’t get me wrong; I love attention. I loved being a theatre kid in high school. I loved writing for a column for my church newsletter in high school and for my school newspaper in undergrad. I still love performing in my own little ways—it’s probably why I enjoy teaching. But there’s always a “buffer” with performing: I’m playing a character, or I’m a reporter relaying a story, or I’m “Ms. Cline.” If I’m just Katie, I feel a little weird getting attention (which is something we can unpack later). But I’m completely okay with it on my birthday. I even expect it.

I took some birthday pictures at Germania Springs (thanks Eric!),
so please enjoy them throughout this post

So this is a fun post about my birthday, but it’s also about being 25 and getting “older” and thinking about everything that comes with that. I’ve said before that Mom used to get onto me about “wishing my life away.” I have always been future-focused, so a lot of times I feel like I’m older than I am. But because I spent a lot of “my youth” (which is objectively not over yet) thinking ahead, I also still feel like I’m trying to live out my childhood in some ways. I am simultaneously 7 and 70, and I’m honestly not sure what 25 is even “supposed to” look like. Maybe that’s for the best. I’ve always done my best when people just assume I know what to do and leave me to my own devices—like my first newspaper article, for example—because I only have to rely on how I want to do something and not on someone else’s expectations of me.

So I’ve picked 3 songs that mention being 25 and how I feel like those lyrics resonate with me now. The first is, naturally, a Taylor Swift song. And, on one hand, I know that I’ve only been 25 for 4 days, but I kind of already like the idea of looking back on this time and saying, “Wow, I had no idea how my life would change.” I also like this lyric because Taylor’s giving the “you” (in the song, she’s referencing Joe Alwyn, who was 25 when they met, but it’s also me in this case) permission to not know because they’re only 25. As you’ll see, Past Katie really hoped she’d have her life together by 25, but I’m writing this as a full-time college instructor with 2 college degrees who is sitting in her bed at her parents’ house because there’s been a pandemic raging for a full year now. So, needless to say, I don’t have it all together in the way I thought I would.

And here’s every thought I have about that.

 

“Cigarette in my left hand / Whole world in my right hand / 25 and it’s all planned”

 –Louis Tomlinson, “Just Like You”

 

25 is a funny birthday. I don’t know why, but, years ago, I chose 25 as the age that I wanted to be married with kids by. I’ve never told anyone that (because I’m inherently afraid of failure). I don’t know where I got that idea from, if it was on TV or if I just assumed that 10-15 years in the future was plenty of time without having any context of what my 20s or the general the state of the world would be like. But that was the plan. My parents were 23 when they got married. Whenever I planned the weddings of my friends and their then-significant others, I always had them “getting married” in their early 20s (and I have the Word docs to prove it, because I don’t think I’ve ever deleted anything from my jump drive). Maybe it’s a product of growing up in the South. Maybe I’m just the most impatient person in existence. Maybe I was too doe-eyed and naïve (maybe I still am). Maybe, if you want to put a positive spin on it, I had/have a lot of faith in love and want people to find that happiness as soon as possible.

I’ve made a lot of plans in my life. I like to have plans. They make me feel prepared. Before I do anything new and adulty for the first time—like going to the pharmacy or going to the eye doctor by myself—I always ask my mom about the kinds of questions they’ll ask or the paperwork they’ll need. I don’t do true spontaneity, if I’m being honest; I do enjoy “planned spontaneity,” though.

Looking at my life now, I’m definitely not married with kids, so that plan didn’t play out. Sorry, Past Katie. She’d be disappointed, and I don’t mind saying that. Past Katie cared a lot about relationships. She really loved love (I still do); she was obsessed with her parents’ story (high school sweethearts who have been married since 1981), and I think she was really scared and confused and thought that getting married was the epitome of “making it” (and, to be fair, I still think it’s pretty incredible to find someone you’re willing to spend the rest of your life with, but I don’t think it’s the only marker of success). So, 13-year-old Katie would definitely be shocked to learn that 25-year-old Katie hasn’t even kissed a boy yet.

An aside: there was a time, not-so-long ago, that I would never have admitted to never kissing someone—I still feel a little shaky about it, to be honest. But I think there’s so much stigma about when you “should” be doing things like kissing and having sex and that that may have contributed to Past Katie’s fantasy plans. Being the one who doesn’t do something always gets them ridiculed, or the situation is played for comic effect—think movies like The 40-Year-Old Virgin or characters like Emma Pillsbury in Glee. Whenever a character in a high school show/movie/book admits that they’ve never been kissed, it’s always with embarrassment and shame. And, yes, Past Katie would have been embarrassed and ashamed to admit that in high school, too, but that’s because we’re only ever told that that’s how we’re supposed to react.

Looking back on my life (from the ripe old age of 25 years and 4 days), I can see that I’ve done some things differently than my peers. It’s not that I wasn’t interested in dating in high school and even in college, but no one ever approached me about it (and, dammit, I still stand by the idea that I want to be pursued; I want someone to put the effort into me that I put into everything I do—and maybe that’s a strike against feminism, but, wow, do I want to feel wanted [and, yes, I do love that Hunter Hayes song]). The only dance I was ever asked to was my 5^th grade Sock Hop. I didn’t have the elaborate Promposal of my dreams (though I did help execute a couple). My best friend in high school did get me a corsage for Senior Prom, and it was such a great surprise, but his date did drop out a week or so before Prom, so I do feel like I was robbed of an “official” date.

So, long story short, I didn’t date in high school or undergrad, but I did so much, and I’m so proud of all I accomplished. And I did it all for me because I wanted it. I will never look back on my life and have regrets because “so and so” wanted me to do or not do something. My only regrets will be that I wasn’t bold enough to try something. But, in the words of Magnus Bane, “Regret is such a pointless emotion, don’t you agree?”

 

“So we talked all night about the rest of our lives / Where we’re gonna be when we turn 25”

 –Vitamin C, “Graduation (Friends Forever)”

 

Because of COVID, I celebrated my 25^th birthday in Jacksonville, which makes it seem like I never left. But I have. Leaving was an unspoken part of my life plans, even when I didn’t think about it specifically or know where I would be going. At one point, I was going to be an actress or a songwriter. I was going to move to New York with 2 separate friends at 2 separate points in my life. After 22 years of being told about “all my potential,” I was itching to leave. I know that doesn’t happen for everyone, and that’s fine, but it happened for me. I love my hometown; I cry to Taylor Swift’s “Tim McGraw” whenever I leave it (because I listen to Taylor’s entire discography whenever I drive to and from Kansas, so that’s the song that plays first).

I don’t think I ever knew exactly where I’d be when I turned 25 until I was…24 ½…My 6^th grade gifted class actually performed a version of this song in a play that we wrote. We changed the lyrics to “talked all night about the rest of our lives / where we’re gonna be when we turn 16” and “keep on thinkin that it’s time to drive,” and we inserted our classmates’ names into the song: “Will little brainy [Robbie] be the stockbroker man? Can [Ashlon] find a job that won’t interfere with her tan?” Well, according to Facebook, Robbie got his industrial engineering degree with honors from Georgia Tech, and, as of last summer, Ashlon is still in the Jacksonville area. As far as other people from that gifted class go, Troy is a singer; John is working on movies and is married to one of my college roommates; Garrison is getting his master’s in business and just married his high school sweetheart; Courtney is applying for med school soon; Madison does art and travels like the free spirit she is; Alyce has a degree in criminal justice and is working as a police dispatcher in Florida—and I know I’m forgetting people; I’m writing this at 3AM after all—but my whole point is that I wonder if any of us had any inkling that we’d be where we are now when we rewrote those lyrics over a decade ago.

I feel like I’m doing really well for myself. I always want more, but, objectively, I’m doing well. I got a full scholarship to JSU where I double-majored in English and Digital Journalism; I was editor of the newspaper and vice president of the Honors Program; I presented at institutional symposiums and one regional conference. I got into grad school and moved halfway across the country. I taught for the first time; I got a school-wide teaching award; I presented at 2 major conferences (should have been 4, but COVID got in the way); I finished my Master’s Project, which I’m looking at published someday. I got a full-time teaching job. I. Published. My. First. Article. This. Year.

I’ve done so much that I couldn’t have predicted. And, in a lot of ways, I like it better than if my plans had gone, well, to plan. Because when I made those plans for my life, I was just assuming that my life would follow the archetypes that I had seen in the media—but what I’ve done has been surprising and new and exciting. It’s been scary and hard and exhausting, too, but, ultimately, I’m glad that life has taken all the turns that it has. Because Past Katie could never have dreamed up some of this.

I’m still going to make an excessive number of plans. Like I said, it gives me some peace of mind to be prepared.

Right now I’m thinking that 35 feels like a good age to be married with kids by.

I’ll let you know in 10 more years.

 

May the odds be ever in our favor,

Katie