I’m Millie and at 11:56pm on April 9th, I began to cry. For context my birthday is April 10th, and I don’t think I have ever not cried on a birthday. When I was 9 years old it was because I had just moved to Massachuasetts and had no close friends, when I was 13 it was because my hair didn’t straighten just quite right and I didn’t like my outfit. At 16 I rang in the most pathetic birthday alone because I could only see my friends on the porch for 15 minutes due to covid, and as I turned 18 I competed in my last ever dance competition after competing for 14 years.
Although all of these past memories hold a sore spot in my heart, this year as I turned 20 the tears felt unfamiliar and unsettling. First of all, I was just as close to being 10 as I was to 30, which is unnerving in itself. Second, I felt like the 20s had a sort of weight to it, a pressure to hit most of my major life accomplishments in just 10 short years. Most terrifying of all I was saying goodbye to my childhood.
I have always had a fear of leaving things. I think I hid in the bathroom every check out day as a camper, cried my eyes out graduating elementary school, and middle school, and high school, and pretty often as I ended TV series or comfort movies. To be even more dramatic I always count my lasts, even when it feels ridiculous. For example I distinctly remember thinking to myself at 14 as I walked to my bedroom it would be the last time climbing up the stairs in my house with braces on. It has become such a constant fear that anything and everything will always come to an end and no matter how many lasts I count I always feel like these ends have a way of sneaking up on me.
This fragility of happiness and grasping the last whispers of the moment, as you could put it, has always lingered in my mind and has taken up much of my headspace as I lay in bed at night. As with many things in my life, days feel long, weeks feel short, and it feels as though eventually I will be faced with the fact that whatever I am doing will inevitably end and I will have to move on to the next thing.
I wish I could say I have developed some sort of strategy for all of this, something that was foolproof enough to stop me from getting intensely emotional at the drop of a hat. But I have come to find out that only with experience, time, and loss have I truly understood what it is like to face the fears of leaving.
I have watched my birthday pass year after year, seen the end of many milestones, aged out of things that once defined my life, and said goodbye to people pretty indefinitely, I have found that there truly is always something else out there. I won’t lie and say that I don’t still mourn the loss of childhood, the end of my competitive dance career, my ski team friends and my camp friends from summers and summers ago, but I do know that as I continue to move through these goodbyes, I find more things to consume me and fill my identity.
As I bid adieu some of the activities and memories that have defined my life as I know it I have found that there is peace in there endings. Peace knowing that every moment and memory I made will not leave me, and that the cumulative experience of these memories will still be apart of who I am. Looking forward to the rest of my 20s, I know that my childhood is still within me, I dance on my college dance team, I find the occasional weekend to play in the snow with my ski friends, and somehow year after year I still find myself coming back to this place.
Someone was telling me once about the way they think about goodbyes. They said, if your going to miss something, it means it meant something to you. As I look back on all the things I miss, I realize I’m incredibly grateful to have such a feeling. Although it feels hard for me to move on from the sorrow of the last 19 years of my life, as I start to look past it I’m overwhelmed with the happiness that I have something worth looking back on.
I’m still the girl that hid in the bathroom, cried at graduations, and wipes tears at the crux of a movie, yet I am also the girl who can move past these things. After taking my time to face these fears and truly move on and find the next beautiful thing, I am able to tackle what feels like the 10 most intimidating years of my life step by step, goodbye by goodbye.
So, as you start (or continue) to count your lasts, really embrace them, but let them go. It may be hard to say goodbye to this place for a year or more, or it could be the easiest thing you have ever done. Whatever your next destination is, don’t be afraid to say goodbye to this place, as it will always be a part of you, and you apart of it.