By Mary Claire Wooten Photo Sarah Hartsell Everyone has preconceived notions of what a milestone birthday looks like. Sweet sixteens and sign nights surrounded by friends, family and everyone in between. More often than not, these milestones are accompanied by a new found freedom. Freedom the celebrated guest has often counted down the days until receiving. The freedoms, commonly associated with generic milestone birthdays, come from a legal perspective. The ability to drive, vote or even drink are rights gifted to those in the corresponding years. These big responsibilities can cloud the important things accompanying them, like the lessons learned in the wake. Responsibilities that have the potential to be more beneficial than the skill it accompanies. <strong>No</strong>body has ever fully adapted to a concept without bumps in the road (or the car itself in some cases). Augie Barnette, a sophomore majoring in creative media at The University of Alabama, did not pursue his drivers license for months after his milestone sixteenth birthday. “I wasn’t really in any rush,” said Barnette. This would come as a shock to many of his peers, given his early birthday and access to the one form of freedom every adolescent thinks will change their lives. In Barnette’s hometown, multiple serious accidents involving people his age occurred, resulting in a realization that simple mistakes can have long-term consequences. Amongst these lessons, and as a plus on his birthday, he was also permitted to legally drive himself and one friend until a set curfew. Any year can represent a milestone and every year offers the opportunity to grow. As opposed to learning lessons, sometimes a new year can help people gain experiences to better self-reflect and understand personal preferences and values. Christian Mckee, a junior majoring in psychology at The University of Alabama, [16] at the time of his nineteenth birthday, was navigating a new environment, hours from home, in his first year at The University of Alabama. “It was the first time I had lived by myself, I learned a lot about my priorities and standards for personal relationships,” said Mckee. Everything is not so open and closed as it seems though. Mckee recounts this was the age he had to decide what to do with his life, an issue common for many entering a new phase of life with so many new freedoms, ones that weren’t planned out based on age. The age varies for people of the moment first launched from the comfort of one’s childhood home’s and parents, forced alone into the world. <strong>No</strong>t everyone moves out at 19, nor does everyone experience the first dose of reality at 19. For those that do, the learning curve can be overwhelming. Some people have career paths chosen from diapers. Others get three years into a degree and are still struggling with doubts about their plans. Neither path is better. People discover personal goals and ambitions during many different experiences and events and sometimes these aspects of growing up take you by surprise. While questioning abilities are normal, the feeling resulting in years of secondguessing and self-doubt can cause emotional turmoil. A birthday can lead to questioning personal identities and values completely. At the age of 21, Katie Henry had just graduated college from Auburn University with an architecture degree and was entering the workforce with a lot of decisions to make. Most importantly, the question persisted, where now? Henry runs her own business doing contract architecture and design work from her home. “The entire business has been a huge learning curve,” said Henry. To date, Henry has been living in a booming college town and enjoying her life, as if overnight, she transitioned from a girl and student into a woman with a degree and business. The transition was just about as easy as you would expect. “Within the first couple of paychecks I had to learn to actually budget and balance a checkbook which I had never experienced before,” said Henry. It’s commonplace to think that everyone around is ahead of you on a nonexistent path, but adjustment is hard and everyone, in some shape or form, has had to adapt. While specific ages and events in life come without an outline, no person experiences life the same way. Everyone has different backgrounds and upbringings. The surroundings and experiences in life can affect people differently. Maybe a driver’s license means a good opportunity to grasp independence, but sometimes these milestone birthdays bring the gift of a valuable life lesson. Everyone has to learn somehow, but the age and birthday it occurs on depends on the person experiencing it.
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