This is 28 and this is the first birthday I’m afraid of.

I would have guessed this feeling would have waited until the infamous 30th birthday, but I guess in this, like in all things, I am impatient.

My 28th birthday arrives next week. I don’t know why it’s the 28th year I’m afraid of. All these years of my life I’ve spent afraid (clinical anxiety bay-BEE) but I’ve never drowned in despair at the arbitrary ticking of a clock, passing of the calendar page, the thin line separating one year from the next. Birthdays are fun, balloons and glitter, sugar and champagne. Never have I ever wished one might not pass.

I have been trying to figure out why. It’s far easier to fight your demons if you know their names. I ask if it might have anything to do with the fact that Mom married at 28 and I am resolutely single. That may name the peculiarity of the threshold. The sense that I should be passing into good and proper adulthood at this threshold. Buying a home, having a kid, growing up.

Am I falling behind?

I have always been the slowest runner, at the back of the pack. We ran laps back in elementary school and I was the last to finish. I have an average 5K time of over 30 minutes. I stumble through the world and this life with all the grace of Bella Swan pre-vampirism.

But avoiding all mention of competitive athleticism, I am the poster child for gifted excellence. Declared gifted at 8 years old. Magna cum laude from high school, summa cum laude from college, desirable job with a 401K right out of college. A roof over my head that I can afford and a kitten that’s thriving. Hitting the thresholds, excelling above every goal set before me, running and running,

And now is where the stumbling reminds me who I am.

I am single. Never had so much as a prospect. A first kiss I wish I could erase, sure, but nothing more. As I attend fairy tale weddings like clockwork and stare into the small eyes of a creature my friends created, the quicksand claws at my skin. I sink. I think I just slow as it clings to the bottom of my sneakers, but before I know it, the sand has reached my knees.

Almost 28, it now rises to my throat.

I don’t know why, I don’t know why. I have no parent asking when they will get grandkids (they're quite content with grand-pets), no friends nudging me with shrugging eyebrows. But I look for the blue ribbon finish line I am supposed to tear through and it’s so far out of sight that I see not so much as the suggestion of color against the horizon.

I should be a published novelist by now. I say “should” and regret the word immediately. It makes me a self-centered brat. But it’s the only word that fits as I try to untangle the anxiety in my head (and it has so many strands on even the best days). In eleventh-grade psychology, we were made to create 10 year plans. I remember mine only in shadows and ghosts. But one thing sticks in my skin like a knife: published at 26.

Almost 28, I am not.

Not for lack of trying. I count the books I’ve written, looking for credit. Maybe some confetti. The number is 8 by the way. 8 books I’ve written from beginning to end. The rise and the fall and the meandering steps in-between. More than that I’ve started but not finished. Raise that number higher if we decide to count far too lengthy fanficiton. I write and I write and I bleed on the page.

It’s not an uncommon story. It’s one I’ve been trained to handle. I’ve seen the quotes, the thought that you must have enough rejections to wallpaper a room before you will get a single yes. So I dig in my heels, manufacture the grit I once had naturally before it eroded away, and continue forward. But still that voice.

A failure. In exactly the way the world told you that someday you would be.

At 28, my brain tells me I’ve lost my prime. That I am no longer the overachiever. That I have slowed and stumbled and fallen face-first into the muck and no one will come to save me, that I am not worth trying to save now that I am no longer the shining sticker stuck to the top of my multiplication time tables.

There are so many things I could blame for the feeling. Certainly society’s views of a woman’s value as she ages has more than a small part to play (thanks, patriarchy). And the age when Mom married (though she doesn’t press me, asks me to be patient, but I don’t hear her over the SCREAMING in my own skull banging around like a ball on a pinball table).

It’s only now, as I enter my 28th year that I realize how much stock I placed in being a prodigy. The straight-A honors student with a brain bright enough to light up whatever road she decided to traverse. Forgetting the fact that I chose a path where light only gets you so far. Trees fall in my path and all the light in the world won’t be enough to get over the felled tree unless I climb.

I hate 30-under-30 lists. I hate the concept of child prodigies. I hate the fact that as a society, we keep looking for the least work to make the most success. Tell me the story of how much it hurt. Tell me the story of the runner who fell a mile before the finish line and needed someone else to help them to their feet. Tell me about the middle-aged someone who finally was brave enough to try to write their book. Tell me about trying and failing and trying again.

As a former gifted kid, please remind me that I am more than my brain. Remind me that I am more than a gold star and the report card and the “you will do great things” and whatever else I am still treading water in, even though we are years away from any of that mattering. Because as I turn 28, I am still trying to untwist that thread from my identity. At 28, if nothing else, I will remind myself that I am good enough. Because I’m not behind a finish line out of sight.

There was never a finish line. And even if there was, it’s certainly not at 28.