the onion of life

As I was scrolling through Instagram reels today, I happened upon a post on Jennifer Aniston’s account for her 55th birthday. She (or her social media manager) had set a bunch of clips and images of her throughout the years to a sound clip that has been popular on social media lately. The sound is someone speaking about birthdays. She says,

“What they don’t tell you about birthdays is that when you turn a year older, you’re also still all the years that came before that year. I just turned 28 but I’m also still 27 and 26 and 23 and 19 and 11 and 7 and 1. When you wake up on your birthday you expect to feel your new age but you don’t. You open your eyes and everything is just like yesterday, only its today and you don’t feel your new age at all. I still feel like I’m 27 and I am, underneath the year that makes me 28. See, one day, I might say something stupid and that’s the part of me that’s still 19. Or maybe, some days, I don’t trust myself and thats the part of me that’s 23. And for no reason at all I need to cry like a little baby and thats the part of me thats 1. Because the way we grow older is kind of like an onion, each year inside the next one and our birthdays are just a celebration of all the years that came before and a welcoming of the next.”

When I heard this sound clip, I wrote down the last line. Why, you might wonder? Well, in my relatively short existence thus far I have thought a lot about life and time. When I turned 12 the concept of mortality hit me like a bolt of lightning, there was no particular reason why, I suppose I had just reached that level of awareness or experienced enough time and changes to understand that things do not always remain static, life is ever-flowing. To be honest, this realization really scared me. At the time not so much for myself as much as to form the seed of fear of losing a loved one. This fear haunted me for weeks and weeks until one day, brought to tears by my own intrusive thoughts I had to stay home from school and finally tell my parents. They carefully listened and guided me through facing this fear and for a time, the fear slept soundly.

When the pandemic hit in my last semester of university, March 2020, I was shocked, scared, bewildered and brought to a state of awe by this beast that consumed all that we knew. Tearing chunks from our lives and leaving us clinging to the shred of normalcy that remained, white-knuckled, eyes held shut. I tumbled into action, as someone who HATES change and seeks control in every situation I am faced with, the uncertain whims of the monstrosity that was COVID tested every last nerve in my body. Newly graduated, I searched for a job because I had to move to the next step in my life. At 23 I was clearly behind because I had not completes any internships in university (choosing to savour my summers while i wa in school) I was trailing my class mates who seemed to have it all figured out.

I secured a job at the Royal Bank as a teller and 1 year later landed my first role as a Marketing Associate. The relief I felt at ticking that box ‘got a job in Marketing’. Ahhh yes, finally I can relax! But then came my 25th birthday, for many a very exciting birthday filled with new horizons, independence and dreams for the future sprawling out like sparkling light posts on the road ahead. But for me those light posts were my synapses firing with swirling thoughts of existential dread… yup. My fear had reared its ugly head again, the one that plagued my mind and stole my sleep as a 12 year old was back for more.

I began experiencing intrusive thoughts about getting older, time seeming to slip through my fingers like the slick, silky skin of an eel. No matter what I did it kept going. I thought about everything I had experienced, how it all seemed to move slowly in the moment, the feelings so big and overwhelming but now looking in the rearview I could feel myself in each of those moments along the way, feel who I was, how I felt. And I could not grasp how I had gotten here, how had time evaded my keen analytical eye. COVID played a part for sure, stopping time for a beat that before long had turned into an entire song.

I never really thought about time before my 25th birthday. Not really. Not in the way adults always do when they say, “Time goes by so fast, enjoy every moment. I remember when I was 7, 11, 19, 23, 26, 27.” Over the last year and a bit I have done a lot of introspection, a lot of self-reflection and a lot of observing. At first I tried to “be in the moment” more, I would obsess over being present, enjoying myself, taking it all in. And what I found was that I was living in a blur. By being so in my own head about wanting to be present I allowed myself to be consumed by my fear of time passing me by.

So this year, when I turned 26, I decided to take a new approach. To be present but to do so by letting things go. By allowing myself to just be, by not analyzing wether what I said sounded stupid or not. By not worrying about what others might think of me. By not trying to be perfect in every aspect of my life and just doing the things I have always wanted to do (like starting this blog). By not doing things that I don’t want to do and giving myself permission to put my needs above the needs of others sometimes and not feeling guilty. I am not perfect at this by any means, I have to consatntly remind myself to “let it go”, “who cares”, “it’s not that serious” etc. But what I have found is that I am finding a new version of myself, one who is working hard to give herself space to be, permission to make mistakes, and one who is finding such happiness in all of the small seemingly mundane moments that coalesce into the memories we pour over as the years pass.

And so, as I continue on this journey, hearing the sound that played in the back of Jennifer Aniston’s birthday post lit a part of me that wanted to share this experience with whoever wishes to read this blog post. My 25 year old self needed to hear that sound clip but she probably wasn’t ready. 26 year old me understands those words and feels like they are the most perfect articulation of the realization I have been wandering towards. The road is long and sometimes winding. Thinking that all of my past selves are with me as I experience each new day quells the fear of time passing, knowing I am the sum of all the moments I have lived makes the passage of time a blessing. I truly do not think I will ever look at or experience a birthday in the same way ever again.