*A note: Carlos Niño debuted a new album today and that’s what I listened to while writing this one.
I’m 36 years old today. I’ve only been up for a couple of hours and already I’ve been showered with so much love. Generous words have been gifted to me today, a slew of gorgeous sentences strung together to celebrate me and my body—my smile, my lips, my laugh, my mind, the way I willed myself to be born.1 Blessings upon blessings from loved ones wishing me joy and beauty and pleasure on this day and the days to come. Sincere gratitude for all that I’ve touched and changed. I receive these glittery wishes from the same place I experience a very familiar sadness that always seems to come up for me on my birthday.
Birthdays, historically, are hard for me. Amidst the celebration of my life, my focus is always pulled toward loss and grief on my birthday; I don’t know why. Maybe it’s that being alive isn’t always something I’ve celebrated. Maybe it’s that the weight of my existence feels much more present and daunting on this day, inescapable, overwhelming. Maybe turning another year older brings to mind how little control I have over the aging of my body, how I slowly/quickly continue to drift toward impermanence, irrelevance.
I think about the concept of “aging gracefully” a lot, not necessarily from an external, skin-deep place but as an inner experience of calm, surrender, and acceptance of one’s burgeoning mortality. Unfortunately, I don’t have good role models of what it means to age gracefully. I never have. I’ve watched pretty much everyone in my life (parents, aunties, grandparents, peers, siblings) rail against getting older, doing whatever they could to resist nature—from plucking their grey hairs and working to smooth out crow’s feet to straight-up lying about their age and pretending their birthday doesn’t exist.
Writing all of this out makes it make sense why I tend to brood so much on September 15th.
Wait—I actually don’t want to do this. I’ve brooded enough these last few days. I want to get back to the love.2