Forty.
Since the beginning of the year, right after the decorations were taken down and the Christmas tree unceremoniously kicked to the curb (almost literal, except for the kicking), I’ve been thinking about my birthday.
If you know me, you know that in the last few years I’ve made a concerted effort to get away from making too big a deal out of my birthday. There is a certain joy in being a planner and a looker-ahead; there are also certain dangers, such as impossible-to-meet expectations. There are a lot of other joys out there, though, so I’ve wanted to concentrate on those, mostly. The big deals, I told myself, are the milestones.
The last big milestone was turning thirty, I guess. Ten years ago. As milestones go, it was crappy. About six weeks before my 30th birthday, I’d been laid off for the second time in a year. I was working a crappy temp job and needed to borrow money from my parents to stretch the temp salary to cover all my bills. I was in too much debt with an income that had essentially been cut by two-thirds. I weighed at least 75 pounds more than I do now. I was, though I didn’t really realize it at the time, pretty depressed.
Yet still! Turning thirty was a big deal. I spent too much time bemoaning my state and maybe not enough looking forward, but I still wanted to celebrate. I still wanted to have some cake-and-singing stuff happening.
In the ten years since then, so much has changed. And I still feel like milestones are worth celebrating. But maybe it’s that my idea of “celebration” has changed. I got to spend the weekend with some of the most important people in my life. And I could still look around, and know that there were important people that I love that weren’t even in the room. But they’re in my life, every day and not just birthdays, and that is amazing. That fact in and of itself seems a kind of celebration.
It feels to me sometimes like I do too much looking backwards in this blog. Maybe that’s why I’ve not been writing as much as I’d like to lately. I’m trying to look forward. It’s time to start writing about that too, I think! I don’t know what the next decade holds. But when I think about things at 30 and about how I feel today, at 40, it blows me away. Where will I be in ten years, at 50? If I am blessed enough to still be here at all, I hope to share that with you. With whoever will listen. Not to mention the constant stream of beautiful people in my life, that I love. So settle in, y’all. I have the feeling it’s gonna be awesome.
March 6, 2012
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Jen · 
2 Comments
Tags: birthday, me, milestone · Posted in: Uncategorized
2 Responses
It will indeed be awesome. Man, oh man this life, always twisting and turning and such!
That’s wonderful! Decade birthdays are real milestones.
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