Readers, it is my birthday today.
Oh fifth of April, every year you come around and trouble me so. Sometimes you're a blast, sometimes a disaster but I'm always anxious as you approach. But not this year! This year I will NOT be a freak about my birthday; I will not be unaccountably mopey or focus on the one person who forgot instead of the many people who remembered. Nope. I will spend the day in mature self-reflection and have a reasonable number of adult beverages to mark the occasion.
Some people love their birthdays unequivocally and I envy them; I wish I could just get into celebrating myself without all the concurrent melancholy. I don't know why I react to birthdays the way I do; it's not really even about getting older since I've had these mysterious birthday blues ever since I can remember. Maybe it's just the weight of counting the years of one's life, the feeling of taking a sideways look at time and wondering how it's all going by so fast. And you can't help but assess the state of your personal life on your birthday: who you spend it with--both who is there and who is missing is painfully obvious on this day.
This year I'm looking at it a little differently. This is the last year of my twenties and I am going to make sure it's a good one. There's nothing like a deadline to make you seize the day and that's what I'm counting on.
How do you feel about birthdays?
My wife and I turned 30 last year and it wasn't that bad. I will say the birthday was tough though. Happy birthday and enjoy your last year of 20's.
ReplyDeleteI just had my birthday and the day was fine -- I totally thought I survived. But then I got this weird melancholy thing the day after and it kept gaining traction for the next week. I think for anyone who writes (and therefore has an instinct for recounting history and an urge to make good stories), any marker of the passage of time is provocative in some way. It's not so much downright sad as it is complicated. It churns things up.
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