Unofficial angel numbers and my golden birthday
Before I realised it could be an extension of my OCD, I had a slight preoccupation with numbers growing up. I found ways to give meaning to the numbers I saw, the number of our rented holiday house on the NSW coast. The number of pages in my book or the page I landed on when randomly opening to a page. I still do it now, give meaning to random things. As humans, we love to attribute meaning to mundane things.
Long before knowing what angel numbers were, not to say I’m completely enamoured by numerology now, I was excited to realise five was my favourite number. Five times five is 25, and I was born on the 25th, and I’m one of five children. With even five points to a star, my favourite shape, I felt connected to the number ever since. This symmetry that I focused on made me especially excited for my 25th birthday. I’ll turn 25 on the 25th of this month, 2025. A once-in-a-lifetime birthday I have been looking forward to since I was a little girl.
As a child, I pictured the 25-year-old version of myself: she had mid-length blonde hair, a side part and was wearing a relaxed suit and holding a clipboard for some reason. Mere days away from turning 25, I find myself thinking a lot about that vision I had of myself. As a young girl, I attributed adulthood to clipboards and marriage, neither of which are obvious additions to my life in the near future.
Not to say I haven’t been proud of myself for the last 24 years, but I believe my younger self would be proud of 25-year-old me. I’m glad to have made myself back to her, allowing her favourite things to manifest in my life now.
For years, I was desperately looking for “my purpose” to make it easier to choose the perfect university degree, a decent job to apply for, and to give myself direction. After following that direction and completing a degree that didn’t bring me as full circle as I had hoped, I now realise how lucky I was that things didn’t work out.
Not being locked into a career has allowed me to find a job where I can return to the things I always loved growing up, making content, editing, making people laugh, and creating to connect with people. I am in a city where I belong, Melbourne feels like home.
With my 25th birthday mere days away, I look back on photos and videos of myself in childhood and the early teenage years and find peace knowing that through years of learning, she is doing something she truly wants. There are many years of learning ahead, and the path may not make sense to everyone in her life, nor will they be able to relate to it, but it’s on the way to pure happiness.
These feelings are not exclusive to my career. This version of myself is the most similar to the younger version of myself. Of course I’ve changed, but in the last few years, I have more consistently stayed true to myself. That’s not to say I am at the most authentic version of myself right now or hit this peak and finality of my self-development (although some days I swear I can feel my frontal lobe developing), it is just a moment to pause and reflect on where the last 25 years have landed me.
I am a documentarian (if you can’t tell as I write my thoughts on the internet) and feel that it’s important to my self-development and growth to have these touchpoints to refer back to. To understand the things I have learnt, why the lessons were served to me, and how I can continue to evolve as a person and when growing pains show themselves. I genuinely can’t wait to see what I do with the 25th year of my life. I want to soak up everything the next year has to offer like a sponge.
