When I was 25 I thought like this.

2 years ago I made a pact with myself that I would put an effort into trying to write my current state of mind shortly after my every birthday. Along with the writing I would do a tiny photoshoot to be able to see in the future how my appearance and choice of portraying my appearance changed, along with the way I thought about things. 25 for me was an important age so I started then. Here it is.

Yesterday I turned 25. I'm not usually birthday enthusiast but yesterday was special, 25th birthday is really special. Ever since I was 14 I had marked my 25th birthday as a deadline for achieving some pretty important goals. Well, they were important at that point at least.

First of all I promised myself that on my 25th birthday I would cut my hair and donate it to charity.

Women at 25 don't need long hair anymore, I thought.

I had just watched some kind of TV show where a girl had cut all of her hair off to donate it for the wigs for other children suffering from cancer. That's gonna be me, I told to myself, maybe not at 14, cause, come on, I want to have long hair. I'm 25 now and my hair has never been longer. And it's not going anywhere.

How come? Don't I want to make the world a better place? Well, not exactly. And having a wig made out of my hair somehow doesn't seem the right way to do it anymore. Now I know, that it might take just a tiny bit more than that.

And after all, women at 25 still want to have long hair. Period.

Secondly, I was determined to publish a book. At 25 I had to have my own book. What kind of book? It didn't matter. I made a few attempts to start writing longer pieces of my imagination based on more or less true events but by the time I was 18 I've never returned to it. I re-read what I had written a couple years ago and already then it seemed tremendously silly. To be true, I'm quite afraid to read it now.

So does that mean that my second grand goal has failed? Well, not exactly. Last week I wrote my first scientific article and submitted it for an international conference. Who knows, maybe it will be published in a scientific journal later on. I know that for the majority of people scientific journal doesn't say much and maybe someone doesn't even know what it is. But so it happens, that at 25 participating in a conference and sharing my work, and having this work published and acclaimed by other researchers seems somewhat more exciting than having memoirs of adventures of a 14 year old (and a 17 year old during my 2nd writing attempt) that probably would never get published anyhow. And, oh dear, I hope I have kicked it up a notch quality-wise.

So, in short, no, I'm not there yet but I believe I'm on the right track.

Even more so, I sort of found my way also for a long-term.

Finally, already back then I was determined to explore my creativity and arrive to a conclusion about what kind of artist I was meant to be exactly. I went through all kinds of phases starting from painting with oil and watercolours, drawing hippos (I'm not giving up on this one though) to making headbands and sewing underwear. Well, luckily at 25 I have finally figured it out. And it's photography.

It's curious for me to see that my peers have serious jobs, are having babies and husbands/wives, in other words - living a grown-up life. I admire and don't understand it at the same time. For me it seems like a long-distant future, after all i'm only 25. :)

Written by her, the one from the lost in happiness team.
Originally posted my photography page: http://anitagigante.blogspot.it/2015/05/25th-birthday-resolutions-assessed.html in 2015