In honor of this special “Managing Editor’s Birthday” edition of the Bryan County News, I would like to open my column with an excerpt from “Eleven”, a short story by American writer Sandra Cisneros. Although I am clearly not turning eleven (as evidenced by my driver’s license), I believe that this passage best encapsulates how I feel about growing old.

“What they don’t understand about birthdays and what they never tell you is that when you’re eleven, you’re also ten, and nine, and eight, and seven, and six, and five, and four, and three, and two, and one. And when you wake up on your eleventh birthday you expect to feel eleven, but you don’t. You open your eyes and everything’s just like yesterday, only it’s today. And you don’t feel eleven at all. You feel like you’re still ten. And you are—underneath the year that makes you eleven.

Like some days you might say something stupid, and that’s the part of you that’s still ten. Or maybe some days you might need to sit on your mama’s lap because you’re scared, and that’s the part of you that’s five.

And maybe one day when you’re all grown up maybe you will need to cry like if you’re three, and that’s okay. That’s what I tell Mama when she’s sad and needs to cry. Maybe she’s feeling three.

Because the way you grow old is kind of like an onion or like the rings inside a tree trunk or like my little wooden dolls that fit one inside the other, each year inside the next one. That’s how being eleven years old is.”

Fittingly, I read this short story during ELA in the fifth grade, right before I turned 11. Being a July baby, I was always one of the youngest students in my grade. It suited me just fine though; having a summer birthday meant, of course, not being in school during my special day and having random teachers and classmates I wasn’t remotely friends with wish me a ‘happy birthday’.

(Alongside being a wallflower as a kid, I was unfortunately also a bit petty. This was the burgeoning eleven-year-old me back then; my preteen and teen years were terrible).

In “Eleven,” Cisneros tells the story of eleven-year-old Rachel who is too shy to tell her teacher that a found red sweater isn’t actually hers. The girl who the sweater really belongs to, Phyllis Lopez, eventually speaks up, but the damage was done; Rachel already started crying in front of everyone after her teacher got mad at her for denying that the sweater was hers.

I loved this story back then, and I still do today, because for me it perfectly demonstrates the indignities of growing up. Because at any age, there will be times when you feel as embarrassed and stupid as Rachel did, crying in front of her classmates over a sweater that wasn’t even hers, despite what the teacher wanted to stubbornly believe. Such moments can happen during a bad day at work, on an awkward first date, or at the optometrist during your annual eye exam and you say the wrong letter not because you are half-blind (although this could also be true) but because you simply aren’t paying enough attention in that dark, air-conditioned room on a hot day.

As I move forward into adulthood, I hope that everyone reading this gives themselves the grace to go easy on themselves whenever a bad and/or embarrassing moment pops up in their personal or professional life. I like to think of such times as teachable moments, where we can always learn (or re-learn!) something from them. Because hindsight is always 20/20, unlike my vision.

Song of the week: “The Waiting Game” by Harry Styles

This is the sixth song off of English singer-songwriter Harry Styles’ latest album, “Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally,” which was released this March. Readers of this column may recognize Mr. Styles from his days as a member of the 2010s-era boy band One Direction, but I am here to tell you that his solo work is also fantastic. In fact, I am pleasantly surprised by his musical direction and success, seeing as though Louis Tomlinson was my favorite 1D member growing up.

Andrea Gutierrez is the managing editor of the Bryan County News. From today onward, she will always lie about her age when asked.