I write this on the eve of my 29th birthday and I feel good. I distinctly remember turning twenty and dreading my late twenties. Who will I be in ten years? The feeling of having a decade ahead of me was as exciting as it was dreadful. A lot can happen in a decade, both wondrous and horrible things. To no one's surprise, both of those things did happen to me as life tends throw the good and bad at you. But I am happy to report that I no longer feel this unspoken anxiety about getting one year older. I used to have a bad history of birthdays. Maybe one day I will be brave enough write about those experiences, but you just gotta trust me. One or two or three of them were really fucking bad. As a child I always looked forward to my birthday as presents, cake, and love from family was always cherished - and I got to sometimes wear a tall paper crown in my favorite color. What could be more exciting than that? But as I grew older those feelings shifted. Another year has gone by. Have I done enough? Am I making the progress someone my age should be making? I think one of the gifts of getting older is the perspective of it all.
A few years ago, I saw a Reddit post (stay with me here!) A woman had written in the AITA subreddit, and I know those posts can sometimes be just trolls trolling, but this one seemed really real. You could feel it in her writing. This woman had a lifelong dream to go to Paris with her husband. She was in her late 60s and had never gone. She had never left the US. She had three sons she loved very much and a husband she was still crazy about all these years later. Her youngest son had just gone off to college and she finally felt free. Free to travel and roam the world with her husband. She said how she'd been planning this couples trip to Paris ever since her boys were toddlers, and waited 20+ years to go. She wanted the trip to be perfect, so if she had to wait a few decades, so be it. She explained how life, making ends meet, paying the mortgage, and raising three boys took over her life and she could never prioritize herself and that there was just never a good time to go. I am not a mother, but I have heard countless women talk about how they seem to lose themselves in motherhood, and it's easy to understand how. She and her husband finally go on the long-awaited trip to Paris and as they are in the hotel lobby, her husband excitedly shows her the "surprise!" he'd been planning. In the hotel lobby were her three sons and their grandparents. Her husband was giddy with glee to show her that he'd secretly flown everyone into Paris so they could all share the trip she'd been waiting for her whole life. But she was devastated. She didn't want to share this experience. In her mind, she had dreamed up this trip with just her and her husband, free of sharing it with anyone else. She had craved adventure and didn't want to have to look after anyone else while on this trip, she'd been doing that her whole life and just wanted a few days for herself. She was so torn up about this that she was anonymously asking the internet if she was the one who was being an asshole about it while she should have been sightseeing in the city of her dreams. I cannot find this post and I've scoured google to no dice. There are a surprising amount of people wanting to know if they are being an asshole about similar instances they have found themselves in, otherwise I'd post the link here. You just gotta trust me! The comments of the post were mixed, but the majority said that no, she was not being an asshole. Her husband knew how important it was that they go alone as a couple, and surprising her with the rest of the family had been unfair. I thought a lot about this post after I initially read it and I would even say that this post haunted me a bit, and maybe it still does. Heck, I'm writing about it on this blog for goodness sake! I think this post says a lot about how we put a lot of responsibility on women to hold it together for others and to be so selfless that we wait our lives away. We want to be "good" and "take care of others". Girls are trained as toddlers with Fisher Price toys of kitchen sets and baby dolls that they subliminally catch on that domesticity has a high percentage of being in their futures. On the other hand, this woman had dreamed up the most perfect Parisian getaway and filled her basket with all sorts of perfect wishes that had to come true, there was no margin for error! Her expectations and excitement grew and grew the longer she waited to go. I felt bad that she never had the time or money to travel to Paris, but it seemed like she had decades of pent up rage about not chasing other countless fun and accessible experiences, resentful that she had waited all these years to do a lot of things. It wasn't about Paris. It was about how she had reserved a lot of experiences for a later date until she realized that a later date didn't exist. And now it was too late.
Since reading that post, I began doing all the things I had been planning for "later" because heck! "later" might not even ever happen! I would always think of birthdays as needing to be a HUGE good and HAPPY day. I need to do all of my favorite things and it needs to go well and it needs to be IMPORTANT!!! I wish I could go back and tell 22 year old Kelsey that the day is already important because it was the day you were born. It was the day you came into this world from another one, and it will always be special no matter what. I would tell her that she is so loved and that regardless of if she goes to that expensive restaurant in the West Village or not, she still needs to do her laundry, take off her make-up, and turn back into a pumpkin once the clock strikes twelve. I would tell her to stop wasting time agonizing over when to do the fun things and to just DO THEM. UGH. Do you ever look back on your past self and want to kick them? But we can't go back! We can only go forward with what we have learned!!! I no longer wait to do the things I've always wanted to do for my birthday. Every few months I'll treat myself to something that I would deem "birthday worthy" and enjoy it! And it doesn't have to break the bank. It can be lighting a lone candle on a brownie from a bakery just because, or giving yourself those ten extra minutes in the morning to stretch while listening to your favorite song, or it can even be allowing yourself to sleep in on a weekend you've got nothing going on. If you want to get real fancy, take the time to heat up and froth your milk before putting it into your coffee or hot chocolate. As I get older, I am finding that the smallest things can be the biggest luxuries.
I've been a lot happier not "reserving" something fun or putting something "off limits until x date" just because I want to do it on a special day. I would also find that when I did reserve doing the "fun thing", whatever it was, for my birthday, the excitement and expectation had been built up to such a degree that I would feel like the pressure was on, and it would always somehow fizzle out of my control. This needs to be fun because I've been waiting for this and this day only happens once a year and my friends have taken the time to celebrate me and it needs to go well, it needs to be fun or else!! If this doesn't go well I'll be upset!!! And if the day ended up going south or the experience wasn't good or it just totally soured, it felt like major failure and a huge disappointment. It felt like I would have to wait another full year to try again. Writing this all out, it seems like a dumb way to live life. I maybe think this is also why some can fall into the "bridezilla" trap on their wedding day because we are told since infancy that our wedding day is the most important day of our life and it needs to be perfect, when in reality, it's just a day.
I take this time of year to think of how much of a blessing it is to still be around, and I think that I must still be needed here for some reason, even if the purpose is to simply just exist. I think about how far I've come and I think about all of the people I have met along the way who aren't here anymore. It is so strange when you grow up around others who were born in the same year as you who don't get to celebrate the same milestones as you can. I light a candle, say a prayer for them, and think of their families who miss them more than I could ever know.
Birthdays can truly suck and I think the phrase "birthday cry" is in our vernacular for obvious reasons. It's okay to be sad on your birthday, to miss passed loved ones you wish you could hug on your birthday, and to miss other birthdays past when things were different. These past few years have been anything but ordinary, and I think we are still collectively cooling off from the intensity of it all. What was lost and what was gained. Be bitchy on your birthday, be overjoyed, stay home all day and order fast food or go out and have that expensive dinner with friends. Do whatever you want to do. But don't wait around to do something major in your life just because it's your birthday. You just gotta trust me!
Comments