I am a planner.

I chart out my life with to-do lists and post-it notes scattered on my desk, my computer desk-top, and my blackberry task list. For every large objective, I think in process-oriented task increments.

What, you may ask, does this have to do at all with birthdays?

Simple. Birthdays are the ultimate increment by which to measure progress towards and success in reaching precisely such goals. At least for the first twenty-five years of my life, that was the case.

When I was truly little, the goals were equally small- age five- teach myself cursive using my brother's handwriting homework; age seven- get ears pierced; age ten- have my first big birthday party with all my friends.

Once I hit the teenage years, the birthdays obviously carried with them the more “serious” milestones: thirteen- kiss my first boy; fourteen- start highschool; fifteen- get first real job; sixteen- get driver’s license; seventeen- get senior driver’s license.

And then came eighteen.

Eighteen for me was when birthdays first got serious. At eighteen, I became an adult. And I don’t mean in the legal sense, the voting sense, or the able-to-buy-cigarettes-and-porn sense. I mean that my eighteenth birthday was the first birthday on which I thought about birthdays in terms of what I had accomplished, or what I needed to accomplish in the coming year. With an early April birthday, I had the pleasure of receiving college acceptance and rejection letters for my birthday. Only the thing was, all the good letters came the day BEFORE my birthday, and the skinny, ominous envelopes arrived the day OF my birthday. Oh cruel world. At eighteen, I wasn’t focused on what illicit transgression I would partake in—I was focused on the fact that my “dream” college had delivered the big N-O on my first day of adult hood. Happy Birthday, welcome to reality, sucker.

At eighteen, I was focused keenly on my future. My chart looked something like this: Nineteen- pick college major; twenty- land kick-ass summer internship; twenty-one- take LSAT and begin applying to law schools; twenty-two- get in to top 15 law school, graduate summa cum laude, and move in with boyfriend, soon to be fiancé. Move to big city—live fancy “adult” life together; marry during final year of law school, and start high-paying career, all by the age of twenty-five.

Somewhere between twenty-one and twenty-five the train derailed. I didn’t get in to the big city school of my choosing, and my boyfriend didn’t even follow, let alone become my fiancé. I tacked on another year of graduate school, and birthdays started to send me into a serious funk in which I just wanted the day to come and go as quickly as possible so I could avoid the introspection. At twenty five I found myself single, lonely, and trying desperately to figure out what direction I was headed in life. Sure, I was only single for a little while, and I had a job all lined up for the summer that would likely lead to a final job offer, but I felt as though by failing to satisfy the artificial timeline I had set out for myself I was in some way inadequate as a person. I had failed.

Twenty-five: Grow up.

Fortunately for me, I turned twenty-five in the company of a few friends who were older and wiser than me whose opinions I respected and who tended to succeed in talking me out of fits of irrationality. Rather than placate my whining diatribe on why I was a failure in not checking off my to-do list by twenty-five, my best friend told me to pull my head out of my ass and stop trying so desperately hard to shape my life into the artificial mold I had created for myself. So at twenty-five years, one hour, and 45 minutes old, I let go of my “grand plan.” I adopted the best “come-what-may” mentality that can be expected of a psychotically type-A personality, took a deep breath, and looked forward to the year ahead. At twenty-six, I celebrated my last birthday as a student, and at twenty-seven, I celebrated the first birthday in which old and new friends came together and celebrated as one in the city I now call home. I will celebrate twenty-eight as a newly married woman, three-years behind “schedule.” And I am okay with that, because I wouldn’t take back the three years between for all the world.