What It's Really Like to be the "Baby" of the Friend Group

As my twentieth birthday grows closer and closer, I've taken quite some time to reflect upon how age has defined me. As a second-semester junior in college, I am one of the very few who are still nineteen, (although only for the next two days!). As my friends keep kindly reminding me, at least I've beat teen pregnancy! While all of the friends I grew up with begin celebrating their epic twenty-first birthdays, I'm still stuck in the age of seeming unimportance... and this is the first year that the age difference has really hit me.

In elementary school I was given the fortunate opportunity to skip a grade, leaving me academically and socially similar (after getting over horrendous separation anxiety, that is), to those whom I went to school with, but legally and biologically younger. I made a slow adjustment into first grade before turning six, and continued from there as a pseudo-six-and-a-half-year-old. So even though I was aware of my age difference, growing up never made me feel any different than my peers.

That being said, I have a pretty intense pet peeve of being called a "baby", which stems from these circumstances. When people find out my age, usually the first thing out of their mouth is, "You're such a baby! I honestly never would have guessed," which, honestly, sounds a bit contradictory to me. I will never understand how my budding twenty-one-year-old peers suddenly feel exponentially older than me upon finding out that I'm a few months younger than a majority of them. A quick reminder that I have an early birthday, friends!!!

Before disclosing this information to others, many people I meet often think I'm older than I truly am; but the second people find out that my birth year ends in '96 and not '95, I am a biological outcast. The novelty of the news usually fades fast, but I have always hated how people treat me in that short amount of time, and I'm not sure I've ever told people that.

Over the years, I have learned to cope with being the "baby" of the friend group. Other than an actual age difference, I know that there isn't much that separates me from those around me; and one day, the age difference won't matter at all. All of that being said, this is the first year that I actually feel younger than the rest of my friends. Going to a school close to Boston means an incredible night life for all of my legal friends, and a whole lot of Netflix for me and my Friday nights.

One year is such a small speck of time in the grand scheme of life. As cliche as it sounds, age really is just a number, of which I have never let fully define my life. After 2016 comes and goes, I will go back to living a life without any regard for age difference, and until then, my Netflix nights will have to do. I'm still the oldest damn twenty-year-old I've ever met, and that will have to do. You can't always control the circumstances of your life, but you can absolutely ride it out with a smile on your face.

Abby