Why Don’t You Celebrate Your Birthday?
And Other Questions I ask Myself. A Note to Self upon turning 25.
Dear Self,
Birthdays are supposed to be days of celebration and joy, but when you turned 25, how did you spend your birthday?
The same way you try to celebrate all of birthdays: by pretending they are just like every other day. You do your best to pretend that your birthday doesn’t matter, only celebrating it when friends and family force festivities upon you. But why? Why don’t you celebrate your own birthday?
The truth is: Birthdays, for you, have long felt like something other people celebrated. Even your own birthday feels like an event that’s less about you and more about the people around you, but what other feelings can you expect from the child of a divorce?
When a child’s parents are divorced, that child loses whatever shred of agency they had in their lives, and the joy is stripped from many a celebration and ceremony. The joy is replaced with tension, anxiety, and depression, as, every year, the child is carted back and forth between their parents depending on whose “turn” it is.
The child is not given a choice.
No wonder you don’t care for celebrating birthdays and holidays. While everyone else was learning that these were joyful times filled with family and community, you were learning that birthdays meant bickering and holidays meant hostility. If you managed to make it through a whole holiday weekend without your parents getting into an argument or without one making passive aggressive comments about the other, it was just a small miracle wasn’t it?
And God forbid you voice your opinions and desires about with whom or how you’d like to spend your birthday: your opinion as a child is effectively irrelevant; nonetheless, anything you say can and will be used against you in the Court of Parenting.
The lesson learned is it’s easier to just not care about your birthday at all. It’s easier for everyone if you mute your emotions. If you learn to suppress your feelings and rid yourself of any attachment to your own birthday, then you need not concern yourself with the annual ache that arises when your birthday rolls around. If you stop healing your heart, it can’t be broken again.
But you don’t want to be broken anymore. I see it in you; you see it in yourself. It’s why you attend therapy regularly. It’s why you’ve committed to regular reflection and morning meditation. It’s why you’re journaling and writing to express your emotions as you explore them. You are a young man on a quest to heal himself from the traumas of a troubled youth; it’s a long journey you’re on, so be patient with yourself.
If you look back, and reflect on the path you’ve walked, you can see how far you’ve already come. You can see how proud you should be. Proud of all the growth, learning, and healing you’ve done over the years. From the vantage point of 25, think back on the young man you were at 20, and compare him to the man you are now. Think back on the boy you were at 15, and compare him to the man you are now. Can’t you see how much you’ve changed, and how much you have to be proud of?
As I was first writing this piece, my anxiety-informed, initial answer was “No.” No, I can’t see how much I’ve grown. No, I can’t see how much I have to be proud of.
But that was an answer rooted in a reality distorted by depression and shaped by self hate. When we look past the haze that mental illness erects before the mind, we find ample evidence of continual growth, but, even through the haze, we can still see the vices which have persisted and arisen. But, no one is perfect, and lingering on your shortcomings won’t help you to overcome them; in fact, it’s more likely to keep you rooted right where you are. If you focus on your failure, or your fear of failure, how are you ever supposed to succeed? So instead, focus on how you’ve grown.
When we focus on growth, we understand that our failures do not define us; if anything, they should motivate us. A growth mindset is a powerful tool in anyone’s arsenal. A growth mindset provides a sense of security and certainty, for even if you were making mistakes yesterday or the day before, that need not mean you must make those mistakes today.
A growth mindset means that while our past may inform our future, it does not define it.
The future is forever without definition, for it is in a constantly shifting state. As the future grows nearer, its shape grows more definitive, but it is not until that very moment when the future is upon us that it takes on its final form, but, in that moment, it is no longer the future and has instead become the present, which rapidly recedes into the past just as soon as it’s grasped.
So how could we ever come to see something, anything, as fully preordained or prescribed in such a system. The present, this momentary string of experiences in which we live, is a chaotically shifting landscape of counteracting forces, and even the slightest of disturbances can change the future entirely. This means that things like destiny or fate may in fact be fictions. It also means that questions like, “why did this happen to me?” are effectively impossible to answer and largely irrelevant anyway. The best thing to do is to acknowledge the reality of what happened and seek to answer the crucial questions: “How did this happen?” and “What can I learn from it?” These questions and their answers provide the fodder for fostering future flourishing.
Dear self, you’ve been cultivating your growth mindset for years, long before you knew the term. So you know, deep in your heart, that from 15, to 20, to 25, you’ve grown immensely: in ways you weren’t expecting and to a level that’s surprised everyone around you — even your own mother. You’ve gone from being a nerdy, insecure teenager who volunteered at the local library, to becoming a charismatic young intellectual, hell bent on bending history to his will. At 25, you are an emerging public scholar filled to the brim with revolutionary ideas that could reshape the global socioeconomic order while taking the climate crisis head on.
You’ve become a young man in the perfect position to help lead a branch of the modern revolutionary movement, you just need to build your community. To build a community, you’ll need to share your findings, your ideas, your thoughts, and your emotions with the world. You must become more than you already are, and, to do that, you need to overcome your fear of judgement, of retaliation, of retribution. You need to overcome your fear of sharing your words and ideas with the world. If you fail to overcome this fear, how are you supposed to live up to the grandness of your calling?
You’ve long felt destined for leadership, leadership of thought and leadership of action, and it’s time to step up and lead. You have so much knowledge and wisdom locked away within the library of your mind, and it is essential and urgent that you share that knowledge and understanding with the world. It is urgent, with the climate tipping point lingering 9 years distant, that you share your ideas for action with the world at the same time that you act upon them. You, yourself, believe that our options are extremely limited, and you believe that an ideology based in a combination of Consciencism, the Just Transition, Intercommunalism, Gaian (biosphere) consciousness, and the Third Industrial Revolution, is one of the only hopes the world has left.
So why don’t you, why haven’t you, begun to share that ideology with the world?
Fundamentally, it’s about imposter syndrome and other underlying insecurities, and you know it. I know that these challenges have troubled you for years, over a decade, so it’s okay to take time to focus on overcoming the depression and anxieties that plague your waking mind. However, you also need to push yourself out of your comfort zone and start speaking and writing more. You need to start sharing your message. It’s going to take time for people to hear the truth you are telling, and you need to give them the time they need to digest what you’ve discovered.
It may take months, it might even take years, before people start to hear and listen to you, but don’t let that prevent you from speaking your truths today and engaging in acts of service in-line with those truths.
This is your calling, this is your purpose, so you must fulfill it.
For your birthday this year, do yourself a favor: Live up to the fullness of your potential, let go of toxic attachments and poisonous thoughts, embrace this ride you are on, and seek out joy where you once saw fear.
