Friday, January 23, 2009
Next Week
At work, just an hour or so ago, I happened to glance at the phone at my desk and something about looking at the date/time display on the phone made me remember that my birthday is coming up next week. I've known that it was coming, of course, but hadn't really thought about it; I have a complicated perspective of birthdays, having gone through a phase in my life when I was determined to de-emphasize that particular personal occasion because it was a Western construction of no real meaning that perpetuated an inherently superficial perspective of time and space that our culture has turned into a concrete truth. And yes, I had a marvelous time at college, why do you ask?
Despite this history, though, my birthday suddenly means something to me. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that within the past week or so, I stumbled across a journal entry that I wrote around the time of my last birthday, and I could practically see the heat waves coming off the page, so powerful was the sense of simmering resentment and misery. But a lot has happened in the past year, a lot of good stuff, and I find myself wanting to embrace that, an oddly positive mood for someone who has so actively embraced negativity and pessimism. I still struggle with that negativity every day, still hurt every day, still feel loneliness so intense I have trouble breathing sometimes, still feel so tense that I clench my teeth so tightly while sleeping that my jaw pops repeatedly when I'm eating breakfast the next morning.
Yet here I sit, unable to avoid the simple truth that no matter how badly I feel about things, things have gotten better. Today, for the first time that I can remember (literally), I reached out to a friend to a) remind them that it was my birthday and b) ask them to celebrate it with me. There's more to say about this, but this is an issue saturated with deep emotions for me, and I'm at work, and I'm afraid that if I keep pushing it I'll find myself in a position where someone will come up to me with a technical question and I'll just burst into tears, crying, "My mother never loved me enough!" Which isn't true, of course. She loved me plenty. But she did beat me about the head with live trout. Well, that's a lie. It was sardines. And they were dead. Just like. My. Heart. Happy birthday to me.
Despite this history, though, my birthday suddenly means something to me. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that within the past week or so, I stumbled across a journal entry that I wrote around the time of my last birthday, and I could practically see the heat waves coming off the page, so powerful was the sense of simmering resentment and misery. But a lot has happened in the past year, a lot of good stuff, and I find myself wanting to embrace that, an oddly positive mood for someone who has so actively embraced negativity and pessimism. I still struggle with that negativity every day, still hurt every day, still feel loneliness so intense I have trouble breathing sometimes, still feel so tense that I clench my teeth so tightly while sleeping that my jaw pops repeatedly when I'm eating breakfast the next morning.
Yet here I sit, unable to avoid the simple truth that no matter how badly I feel about things, things have gotten better. Today, for the first time that I can remember (literally), I reached out to a friend to a) remind them that it was my birthday and b) ask them to celebrate it with me. There's more to say about this, but this is an issue saturated with deep emotions for me, and I'm at work, and I'm afraid that if I keep pushing it I'll find myself in a position where someone will come up to me with a technical question and I'll just burst into tears, crying, "My mother never loved me enough!" Which isn't true, of course. She loved me plenty. But she did beat me about the head with live trout. Well, that's a lie. It was sardines. And they were dead. Just like. My. Heart. Happy birthday to me.
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