My Birthday – my way
Peter Pan me, please.
I don’t know what to do on July 31st.
Any July 31st. Last one, 2020, that was a clinker for reasons that are obvious and need no repeat. Add to those historical hindrances, I turned forty.
That fact, dear friends, is a thing I don’t know how to speak on nor feel about. In my manic Googling preceding the day, upon the day itself, and in this year that has followed I have learned that I am not alone. Not in turning forty, I knew that. But in web search, message in a bottle asks for what that experience is and is to be all about. So yeah, I did this and not in a lofty-headed space of seeking what others want to know but because I did (a/k/a do)! I am here and so god-damned hungry to be normalized in a very desperate way. Where to land my fear and confusion and, dare I say it, possible satisfaction with who and where I am. For on other days that are NOT my Birthday, I am kinda in love with me. Or at least in deep affection.
The greatest lesson my 30s taught me is that: “This is my face.” Right here. This thing between my hairline and above my neck is mine. It belongs to me alone, an amalgamation of my gene pool, skin care regimen, and a painful bone-shattering assault the Summer of my twenty-eighth year when an object, a brick no less, was used by a group of strangers to smash my left ear, cheek bone, and jaw. The eye socket took a lot of it as did the tiny electric connections that still slightly impair my hearing. This face, the one that is mine, spent a lot of time wrapped like a mummy and swollen like a marshmallow. She, this mug, came away different – as did the woman beneath. Both of us grateful to be together despite the bruises and sensitivities that were and so remain. We don’t look so bad. I mean, if I was to pick a face from the rack, I surely might have made a few choices other than want I ended up with, but so be it, this one I got works out alright, she does. I am “lucky” and not, but here and so we are.
Prior to the assault and for a bit after I was heavy into cosmetics and hats- I wore a lot of hats during the healing and various evolutions and bruising, so when I was done, I was done. And thus, went HARD into nixing any and all adornment – my ears being torn through in the violence that earrings are off the table entirely. It was odd as I am a person who digs on a good deal of sparkle and hails from a mom who goes HAM in that arena. At first, it felt like giving up or in or some other kind of exhaustive response to fatigue of having things there ‘done’. Yeah, no. I wanted to see, is all. To know what I was to be looking at, what was and is there to be seen, and DAMN I sure got myself a good deal of opinions – others saying, “You look great!” by way of encouragement while I’m thinking, “What am I looking at?!”
As much as I would never dare seek advice such an esthetic evolution on anyone, having had it at the cusp of thirty I am certainly not sorry. It stopped my entire life, this thing. Stopped for a long, long time before it restarted and when it did, it was not in the same way it was – in feeling, esteem nor execution. Also, an influence was that only nine months before the above stated bullshit, I left an inpatient treatment program where I had spent most of the the previous two years. A lot of hiccups and more than a few, albeit self-welcomed, monkey-wrenches. Very well timed, considering the particular “age” I was in. No, not in historical time nor culture, but in legit calendar “age”. Just at the time when one, as you may each know well or well-ish, gets bitch slapped by the existential bullshit that is the long winter of middle age, I was fucking up and getting fucked in the way we think of much younger persons doing and being. Anorexia and physical-stranger crimes are to happen to those in college or below when there is ample time to recover and empathy of not having “it” together. Fail and double fail on me.
OK so, like a decade or so later last year, and now a decade plus 12 months this past week, I continue to carry a very ardent understanding and appreciation of being a mess. That kind of mic drop of experience that is extremely unrelatable to a good deal of folx. No TED Talk here, we just have this me-shaped thing in support group after support group, therapists’ office and doctors’ waiting rooms; too, in my bathroom mirror wet and naked and looking back at herself to the tune of “this is me, huh?!” It sure is, and now, I have no idea what 41 looks like nor how to celebrate that I am that on a very specific date one week away from when I am writing this and a few others after it shall premiere to you. All I do see in so many selfies and back by way of my reflection that it is this – this night that is a weekend where I am much more at peace here in my apartment with animals, too many by the standards of others, likely, married to a person who is the exact opposite and an ideal complement to all I want and aim to be.
I say this a lot in group and in talking about and introducing others to some of the roads I have traveled in this oddball existence: “I did not die and so I live.” I wanted to, or God, did I want to, and maybe I still might. However, the ways of killing and being killed I have met are really hard to successfully execute – for me, at least. And so, I am tired out from violent self or external attempts at destruction. Instead, I’ll conserve a bit of energy and get on with being content. I’ll take on the changes that need be approached and in the time that I feel is correct. I’ll be mad and depressed and often annoyed as much as I need be and keep marching forth. Happy Birthday and may I trust I am trustable and know the best and so inspire others to see they do.
There is little to Google that will instruct the above other than a measured doing and fearless invitation to fucking up as defined by others who don’t know it as well as I do. Make all the bad decisions if you feel inspired to honor me this year. I promise you they may be ‘wrong’ but you are right and what if one day a person searches for an internet year on a day when they are worried they might need to or supposed to be a something they think they should and they find this and it is of value? If nothing else, at least it will be a decent read.
