a very mundane birthday

My birthday is usually just a day. While I do get presents, and occasionally celebrate with a few people, for the most part it is just a day. as I got older, I didn’t feel a need to make it into a big deal, and I found the size of group I celebrated with on my birthday dwindled through the years, and until this year I noticed that I had spent most of my birthdays with my immediate family, rarely venturing out to celebrate with others.

Maybe its because I view life as a repeated cycle, or that there are too many points throughout the year that are symbolic of rebirth and a new year, but I think that only the first few milestones, and from then the major milestones should only be celebrated. Its not that I think milestones aren’t important, but it becomes redundant to celebrate after every mild win, and dilutes the feeling of accomplishments for bigger wins in life.

I love my birthday but it just never felt like the start of my life. And I know that sounds dumb, obviously it is the literal start of my life, but my memory is beyond the point where I am able to determine when I truly began feeling like a human, and when I began to remember the feelings and memories I encountered throughout my life. My actual birth does not feel as visceral as the rebirths I have forced myself to endure over the years.

I think I was about ten when I started to worry about everything in life. When you’re a lonely child, surrounded with the company of books, fantasy lands, and an uncensored thirst for knowledge, I was enamored by the melancholy of worry. Though these are all observations I make now as the twenty three year old, and not the eleven year old full of anxiety. I knew that there were an infinite amount of scenarios I could be in that were immediately worse than the life I was living, I was constantly worried that something awful was going to happen to me, even though I knew I lived in a relatively safe area, and kept myself out of trouble due to my already growing anxiety of doing something wrong, or having something go wrong.

As I got older, my worries got worse, and the fear of something happening kept me home, where I knew I would be safe. While part of this wasn’t a choice, I also was a truly cautious child, extremely concerned for my personal safety. One of the main things I remember about being a teenager is being extremely early to any event, the fear and anxiety of being late prompting me to leave way ahead schedule, a habit that continues to plague me at times.

What I did not know was that while this was MY normal, it did not have to be. Having my son forced me out a lot of my previous anxieties and fears, and the energy that had been taken up by worry was put use elsewhere. When I was sixteen I started working on easing the anxiety I suffered from, and eventually made a lot of progress, by the time I was eighteen I had managed to work through a lot of my previous feelings of anxiety, and was doing much better than I had in years.

Getting married, having a baby, and managing a family brought up a lot of those old fears of life and anxiety of losing control of situations. While I wasn’t able to devote all of my time to my worry the way I had as a child, I still found myself consumed with dread when I laid in bed at night and attempted to sleep. I eventually began doing everything I could to exhaust myself into passing out instead of falling asleep naturally, afraid to be alone with my brain, and letting it roam free.

Because of this lifetime of worry, and because I know that a lot of it is unreasonable, a symptom of the chemical imbalances in my brain, manipulating my brain into worrying, I feel a lot older than I am.

In twenty three years I have learned a few things that I try to live by.

1. Rebirth can take place at any time, under any circumstances.

I know I mention it a lot, but it is one of my favorite things about life. a lot of people assume that change is impossible, or change is always dramatically and drastically different, but the smallest changes are always the most impactful

2. Life is about constantly learning

I don’t know if its just because I need to fill my head up with something other than just my own thoughts, but I cannot be happy without learning on a regular basis, and Im talking about learning anything. As long as I learn something new, my brain keeps making happy chemicals.

3. People are often too caught up in their own problems to notice how they represent themselves

I like meeting new people, mainly because I like to talk to people who are different than me and getting an idea on how they view life. I am also a single woman, in the digital age where anyone can message anyone.

It doesn’t matter the gender, everyone gets caught up in their own shit at times, and it eventually leads to some pretty ugly people, and reminds me that not everyone has empathy

4. situations will continue to repeat until the lesson has been fully understood, or behavior has changed

I have lived through repeated scenarios every few years, the only thing changed being the people involved. I have reflected on events in my life that seem similar and dissected them over and over, trying to figure out the differences, and how I worked through every scenario. I noticed that over the year, eventually details drop out of the repeated scenario, until one cycle, it doesn’t happen. Some cycles always happen, just because they are meant to, but they usually offer new knowledge, or confirmation of the knowledge you learned from it the last cycle.

In my twenty three years, all I have come to learn makes me feel insane. When I talk I feel like I should feel smart, but I usually feel dumb. When I reflect on my past all I see are the former versions of myself. When I write, the version I need the most for the piece I am writing sits right next to me. The silent reminder of what I learned, what I went through, and what I have been.

Truthfully, all of the reflection is mainly fueled by anxiety and the overwhelming feeling of worry and needing to know how to be better, how to do better. It is not a choice made willingly but rather forced upon me by my own feelings of worry. Writing has been the only time I haven’t felt entirely insane, the only thing I have full control over.

Twenty three definitely feels like a good time to start living.