21st Birthday Thoughts
I turn twenty-one years old today – in 19 minutes, exactly. By the time I finish writing this, it will be my birthday. It feels like a real-person age, where some sort of metaphorical key to the world will be handed to me and somehow, I’ll be able to celebrate in a way that feels socially legitimate. However, regardless of their “social illegitimacy”, I have loved every age that I have entered into on this day. All of my birthdays have felt significant to me; I have felt joyous and weepy and elated and transformed and held in beautiful ways. Those kinds of feelings aren’t new to me when it comes to birthdays. The season of mid-May is warm and bright, reminding the world that we emerge, we belong, we exist, we matter, we move forward, we live.
I have loved May 11th for my whole life – I think I would love it even if it wasn’t the day I celebrated as mine. It’s a funny, prime number kind of day, where things feel proportionate and distributable and shareable, even though the number eleven isn’t divisible by anything but itself and one. May, the fifth month of the year, is prime in the same way. Mathematically speaking, today seems to be unshareable with anything but itself, a day entirely separate from the days before and after it. But what is held inside the day – the emergence, the brightness, the emotion within – feels particularly communal, shareable. It is a day that is standalone in its structure, yet entirely connected in its feeling. It is a kind of cognitive dissonance that highlights the illogically-logical parts of life. It feels whole, imperfect, and precisely designed by a divine blueprint. I love that about my birthday.
Generally, I am not particularly drawn towards feeling significant or particularly noticeable amongst the backdrop of everything else. Yet, there is something about May 11th that taps me on the shoulder and asks for permission to feel special, significant, and important. Usually, I accept, because I do love to be loved. I love to be noticed as something set apart from the noise of spring melting into summer. Birthdays are meant to be felt, and I love to feel them. I have looked forward to this birthday in particular for a long time.
Tonight, though, I can feel my spirit asking me for permission to let this particular birthday just be another Monday – to let the uniqueness and the connectedness go, to give it up for another time. I feel a smattering of things, none of which feel familiar to me in the sense of birthdays and honestly? There’s not much else to do but cry about it. The collective emotional consciousness amongst the living (that I deeply love feeling so connected to) has been overwhelmingly saturated with sadness and distress lately. In what seemed like an overnight transformation, how we feel connected to each other was rewritten. I am a touch person, a hand-holder person, a kiss-on-the-cheek person. Like many of us, I feel as though my love language has been ripped away from me. Close proximity to others now makes us anxious – it makes me anxious, too. I have days where I feel almost adjusted, like maybe I can convince myself that I could live off of FaceTime or Zoom alone.
But my expectations, hopes, and disappointments tonight are smeared across my face – I have never been good at shielding my thoughts from my expression. I gave up trying to disguise the truth from my face a long time ago. So, feeling festers inside me, saying that today may feel hard, sad, or exhausting. A day that was meant to feel so much different than it does. These feelings remind me that this day can be just another day in the year, a year that forges unapologetically ahead regardless of what anyone has to say about it. I can let this day go, and let it be. But letting it go makes me feel like I’m losing – surrendering a joy that was meant to be mine, yours, and ours. And everyone will know that this is painful, just by looking at me.
But, in light of all of that, I would like to slowly emerge into this day with a quiet disposition, knowing that a day, even a distinctly beautiful, prime-number-kind-of-day, can’t be all mine. I don’t have to exist joyfully because I’m supposed to be joyful; however, I can exist peacefully, because I can understand that the universe gives and takes in a rhythm of its own, and my world isn’t ever at the center. I am learning how “I know” and “I understand” carry different weight, mean different things. I am listening for the “I understand” from my own body, from the people I love, from my spirit.
To know is to have knowledge. To understand is to feel knowledge. This whole-body surrender is submerging me in myself – and I am deeply feeling tonight.
I am incredibly grateful for the love that I am offered today and every day. Because, as my best friend just reminded me, I am beautiful right now. I am a day older than I was yesterday. I have people who show up for me every day of the year. The undercurrent of my life feels resilient and growth focused. Who could complain about something as wonderful as this? I have a heart, a body, a spirit, a sense of goodness inside me - and these things cannot ever be taken from me.