Because my birthday is in January, I save the retospectives and resolutions for the morning of. I snap a selfie once I’m awake enough to get one I like, but there’s no pretense, I don’t do my hair or put myself through a bunch of filters that make me look younger than I am. One of the cooler things about being so very middle aged is that I’m all, “Fuck it, this is what you get. This is who I am. Face value, yo.”
This morning I am at my friend’s house in rural Virginia. I have a wicked sore throat and shortly, we are off to the urgent care clinic to make sure I don’t have strep. (Yay, it’s just a virus.) The clinic doesn’t take my insurance, so it’s going to cost me a stupid amount of money for a three minute office visit, after which they will hand me a ten dollar package of antibiotics. The US appears to be going to war with Iran, a move I’m convinced is based in the Evangelical Industrial Complex (which I realize makes me sound kind of paranoid/crazy but…). There is a lot going on and I am very much transitioning out of what my life has been for the last five years into whatever is next.
I can’t control many of these things. The government. Our national health insurance idiocy. The dark circles under my eyes. They happen no matter what I do. So it would be easy to feel negative about the future right now, but for the first time in many years, I am feeling strangely optimistic.
I don’t know if you’ve ever felt like your life had somehow got away from you. If you have, I do not recommend a lengthy black depression as a gateway to reclaiming your exisitence, but it seems that’s what happened to me. I feel a little bit like you do when you come out of a dark theater blinking in the sunshine, or maybe like when Dorothy lands in Oz and everything is in color after a long season of black and white.
All kinds of things are happening that make me quite aware that I’m no longer 30, or 40 even, I am so very of my 50s right now. And while it would be so nice to reclaim the packaging of my 30s, I am okay — no, better than okay — with most everything else. My work. My creative life. The place I have chosen to be my home. Yes, of course there are things that I want to change, of course there are loose ends from this last run of uncertainty, but for the first time in many years, I am facing my personal New Year feeling optimisitc about what’s to come.
Happy birthday to me.
loose ends can make a nice fringe aroud the fabric of one’s life. or, if they are long enough, be braided into an edging that is more like protection, than like loose ends. you get to choose – even tousled like bed head they can serve a design of your own.
happy birthday niecey….see you in March. xox
Happy birthday, sister. xo
‘Face value, yo’ I love it! You have a great attitude towards life, despite the mess the world around us holds. At the beginning of COVID I thought I was experiencing depression. I then realised I was just being a cruise baby and needed to reshift my mindset into a place of gratitude for my health, roof over my head and take advantage of the ‘downtime’.
Happy belated!