Hello and welcome to her welcome back to Trinidad to Care. If you're listening to this episode in real

time when it drops, my birthday is this upcoming weekend. It's April 4th. I'm an Ares baby.

And it's actually my last year in my 20s. I'm turning 29. And as exciting as that is, birthdays for me have always been hard or at least hard for me

when I got into like high school, college, because there's a lot of loneliness that comes

with your birthday, expectations that aren't met, wanting to celebrate by having no one to celebrate

with, and then of course, the fear of getting older. Like a lot of

people, I had quite the crash out when I turned 25. I had the great 25 year crash out, my

quarter life crisis, because a lot of my value or how I valued myself was linked to my beauty, but specifically my youth.

So when I realized I only had five more years until I turned 30, I felt this sense of impending

doom. Society puts so much pressure on aging, specifically on women, and makes us feel as

if once you hit 30, you're chopped. And you think it's just men saying these

things or these are just expectations that we grew up with, but no one actually thinks that now.

But then you see these comments on social media where it's like you have a disagreement with

someone and they use, you're pushing 30 as an insult as if 30 is ancient or 30 is bad. And I really got sucked into that discourse

and spent the majority of my 20s being afraid of inching closer to 30. I remember on my 25th birthday,

I was getting ready to post a photo for my birthday photo shoot. And I had so much anxiety doing it because I was

like, oh my God, people are going to know. People are going to know I'm 25. And they're going to look at me

like, I'm spoiled milk. I was genuinely so scared and ashamed that I was 25, which is so ridiculous

to look back on now. But that's truly how I felt. But then when I turn 26,

something inside my brain flipped. 25 is such a big milestone to hit. There's a lot of fear and

anxiety building up to it. But then once it happens, once you turn 25, it's like, okay, it happens,

I'm fine. I'm not getting any younger. So why fixate on the age that I once was,

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