Turning 15 is being told that nobody is ever coming to save you. Turning 15 is Lucky Charms for breakfast. It’s wanting to be a senior like you wanted to be a fifth grader in kindergarten because you thought they were so cool. It’s backing into a parked car for the first time and sobbing as you leave your phone number on their windshield. Turning 15 levels the playing field between the gifted kids and the burnouts. Turning 15 is a fever dream. But turning 18 is a lucidity train wreck.

Turning 18 is still having to go to class even though it’s your birthday and nobody wishing you a happy birthday because you didn’t tell anyone it’s your birthday. It’s being unsatisfied by the amount of attention you’re receiving and self-aware enough to know that’s silly but self-involved enough to still feel it. It’s weird to be 18. If my 15 year old self could see me now, she’d be thinking, “You weren’t supposed to be here still.” 

Turning 18 is accepting the absolutely insufferable lack of satisfaction found in forgiveness. It’s going out with a friend I haven’t seen in five years and remembering things I had forgotten about myself. It’s learning that just because you didn’t mean to hurt someone doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt them. Turning 18 is realizing you never would have learned to ride a bike if someone you trusted hadn’t let you go. It’s being old enough to have old friends. It’s learning people are experiences and not possessions. It’s not being able to look people in the eye because you know something is making them deeply irreversibly sad and they’re just here talking to you about the weather, and you’re going to let them. 

Turning 18 is realizing that the phone isn’t bad — it’s exactly the opposite. The phone is too good; the phone is better than mountains and rivers and lakes and oceans and soaring birds and wild horses, but it’s better in the same way that being alone in your bedroom is better than family dinners. 

Turning 18 is only getting 10 minutes to freak out before you have to figure it out. When you’re five, you can be mad for a day. When you’re 10, for an hour. By the time you’re 18, you get 10 minutes — and then you have to move on. It’s finding out that your independence is really just grief for every time you asked for help and no one showed up. It’s crippling insomnia because you can’t fall asleep without the obnoxious sound of your older brother yelling at his video games in the next room over. Turning 18 is never being able to go home again, when you’ve drifted so far that the thread snaps and you’re forced to find somewhere else to belong. 

Turning 18 is being a Russian nesting doll of trauma. There’s your pain; then open you up and neatly nested inside is your mother’s; crack her open and there’s her mother’s. It’s wanting to be pretty so you don’t have to be anything else. Turning 18 is having a voyeuristic relationship with your own pain, always making sure you’re suffering beautifully enough to still be considered worthy of love, because being a woman and not being loved feels like not being a woman at all. Turning 18 is wanting to save the world and settling for helping mom with the laundry instead. 

Turning 18 is realizing that once people are broken in certain ways they can’t ever be fixed, and then trying to fix them anyway. It’s still being the little girl on the playground that nobody wanted to play with. It’s understanding that you are ten times more than anyone will ever know of you. Turning 18 is wanting all your secrets back; it’s not wanting anyone to know anything about you anymore. It’s thinking that every time you make a mistake they’re going to put you down like a sick dog. It’s one day accepting that you’re not dying tragically young like you once thought, so you go to the store to buy dental floss and ingredients for soup. 

Turning 18 is realizing they were wrong when they said nobody’s coming to save you back when you were 15. Many people will save you, even if they don’t intend to. The stranger who smiles at you will save you. The grocery store clerk who gives you a sticker will save you. The lyrics to a song will save you. Turning 18 is realizing we are all saving each other every single day in tiny seemingly insignificant ways. It’s horrifyingly beautiful and joyfully tragic. Turning 18 is just like turning 15 — except completely and irreversibly different.