Birthday Blues

Birthdays haven’t always been something that I’ve looked forward to. It always seemed to be a day I would dread coming and passing me by yet again.

What my friends and I call the birthday blues. 

Another year older. 

Finding more gray hairs on my head. 

The oppressing feeling of not hitting the milestones I thought I needed to by this age. 

Are we wiser yet? 

Time is one of the only things in life that I truly fear. The one thing that is fully out of our control and moves at its own pace. 

It is the one thing that you can feel passing you by and is not something that you can get back.

Birthdays have always exaggerated my fear of time. 

When you are younger, your birthday is a time of celebration! A day where you get to eat cake, spend time with your friends and open gifts? Name a better day, you can’t, right? 

As you age, birthdays come and go as do your years of youth. You play the comparison game with acquaintances that are also turning the same age. Is this really where you thought you’d see yourself at 29? 

The answer is no. 

To be honest, I am not sure where I thought I would be as I head into my last year of my twenties but it sure wouldn’t be traveling full time. 

 

 

Rarely does life go according to your plan and sometimes you are redirected from the things you thought you wanted to the things you actually needed. 

What I needed was the time and space to figure out who I was. What I wanted. The kind of person I wanted to be. 

I have spent a lot of time in my own head thinking about the past, thinking about the future. Never really spending too much time and energy on the present. 

Ironic.

Why is that?

 

There was always something that I was more worried about. How something happened or how it was going to happen. Focusing on things that I could have done differently, or would do better the next time around. 

It was a constant stream of questions running through my mind. How was I perceived when I wasn’t successful in medical school? What do the next 5 years look like? Could I have handled that situation differently? How quickly can I lose 20 pounds?  Will I meet my husband, buy a house, continue to climb the corporate ladder? 

I was so stuck on the why and the what-ifs that I feel that I missed out on enjoying the now. Which I think can be something that a lot of us can relate to. 

I talk about therapy a lot, because it has had a profound impact on me and how I both view and navigate the world around me. It has allowed me to work on having the mental capacity to both learn from, and leave behind the past and look forward to the future without fixating and feeling the need to control the narrative. 

For the first time ever, I am living in the now. 

Sure, there are still times where I sit and think to myself, wow, I wish I could go back and do x,y and z differently. Or stress out about what the next year is going to look like for me. But I now have the ability to turn off the stress of the unknown and just experience what is. 

Looking back at all of the things that year 28 brought me, I cannot believe all that was accomplished, learned, experienced and lived. 

A whole lot of life in 12 short months. 

Imagine just how fulfilled you would be after 80+ years of living like I did this past year? 

 

Time is something that I now do my best to ensure I am not taking for granted any more. I might be tired, but I can promise you that a 5:00 am wake up call to watch the sunrise above the Atlantic horizon is worth it. The nights that you push the boundary on your usually steadfast 10:30 pm bedtime and instead spend the night dancing with your best friends into the early morning hours of Sunday. 

Learning to be thankful and grateful for the time that is had, not the time that is lost. 

I have found that when you shift your focus to living in the present, your priorities change. 

On a Sunday afternoon drinking coffee with my best friend in Chicago, a city I had long dreamed of living in, I cried. Knowing that the idea of living in a city like that was no longer what I had envisioned for myself. I didn’t want to deal with the traffic, the hustle and bustle that a large city like that presented and I certainly outgrew the party-lifestyle that once seemed so appealing. 

I spent my 28th birthday grieving another loss of a version of myself that I would never meet. 

That’s okay. 

At the end of the day, that's what this entire journey is about. Trying out different lifestyles. Seeing what I like, what I don’t like. The pace of life I want to live and the kind of people I want to surround myself with. 

Continuing to figure out who I am. 

Your priorities are allowed (and are supposed) to change as you change, as you grow, as you age. 

So as I ring in year 29, I couldn’t be more grateful, or thankful to be the woman that I am walking into the last year of a monumental decade. 

DJ, play 20 Something by SZA one last time.