Hi everyone. How are you?

I had nothing to do today, a rarity, so I took my shoes off and went to ocean.

I sat in the sand and felt a part of another world. When you’re at the beach, it feels a bit like sitting in the audience of a play or a movie theater. You, and everyone around you, is witnessing something. And that something is so much larger than anything you have ever seen. It’s this rare place on earth where infinity seems to be everywhere that you look. The ocean, the sky, the particles of sand beneath your feet, they all seem to just go on forever. And that much seems to be understood by everyone there. There is this collective, quiet sense of awe that permeates the air. It’s medicinal, even for a city lover like me. You get to stand on the very edge of an entire continent, as a friend once told me. You get to stand as close as you will ever be to infinity on this earth. I can never arrive and leave in the same state. That much endlessness will change you every time. I like to let it.

Speaking of letting things change you, I want to talk about feelings. Specifically, mine about birthdays and authenticity and how I’m choosing to celebrate twenty-one this summer.

A NOTE ON BIRTHDAYS

I have never been a birthday person. As a kid, I remember crying at my own party with a pop-sickle in one hand and a fist full of tears in the other. It was overwhelming to have all of that attention and all of that pressure placed on one, perfectly planned out day. I suppose that I learned pretty early on in life that the best days you will ever have are usually not the ones that you expect to be. And birthdays are always expected to be. The same goes for weddings, parties, holidays, etc. It seems like the anticipation of the day is always better than the day itself. How could it not be when you are expecting all of that joy? I also learned pretty early that you cannot plan and coordinate your emotions. You can’t schedule happiness, it needs to be organic. Our emotions live and breathe within our cells. They die and reproduce and come to life on wavelengths that are all their own. It took me a long time to see this as art, instead of a weakness. And art should be displayed and talked about and respected, not shoved down because it’s messy. The mess is important. It teaches you things. Neatly drawn smiles don’t.

FEEL WHAT YOU FEEL

I remember trying to explain this to my childhood best friend when we were about twelve and her response being “I’ve just learned how to control what I feel”. I remember how mad and confused that made me. We were at such a tender age that I felt that she was simply more grown up than I was. That was all that mattered back then, how grown up we could be. Her comments about her “control” made me feel childish and immature, as if I too should have been able to control what I felt.

But what I felt was always immense. It was monstrous. Sublime. The thought of ever wrapping my hands around it, let alone shape-shifting it, never felt like something that should be done. I seemed to sense the importance of feeling things as a kid and I would suffer for this in a lot of ways that the people around me never seemed to. But this, as it turned out, was because they were usually faking it. They were shape-shifting their presented existences with an ease that never came to me.

It would take years, but I finally understood that my friend’s ability to “control what she felt” what really just her ability to fake it. She would smile and laugh all of the time. She always looked like the happiest person in any room. I, being me, was not. It was our joke that I was the “deep one”. For even then, I was typing out text messages to her that might as well have been blog posts, detailing my thoughts on god knows what. She was the happy one and I was the one with all the feelings. We were the sun and the moon. It took her being hospitalized as a teenager with various mental afflictions for it to click that all of her happiness has been an act. She, and everyone around me, seemed to be playing roles in a show that I never cared to be a part of. I would always rather be alone, feeling real things, than pretending to embody an experience that was not my own.

GRACE VS CONTROL

Looking back, I understand now that there is a difference between having grace with your emotions, and trying to domesticate them. I don’t believe in silencing or delaying or ignoring feelings. I never have. And not by some wise choice, but by the simple fact that I have always felt everything to such an extend that these things were never options for me. I had to work with that. So I learned, as I grew up, not how to control, but how to understand and process what I felt. It became a superpower, a skill. I got really good at feeling things. I found that if I closed my eyes and dove into the abyss, I would always come out the other side with some kind of realization about the world. It became a pattern I could rely on.

So yeah, I cried on birthdays and holidays and vacations just like I cried on Tuesdays and Wednesdays and Thursdays. Because those days were Tuesdays, just with a fancy label. And I never understood why that label was expected to automate a specific experience, simply because we thought it should. If I was sad, I wasn’t going to pretend I wasn’t. I didn’t want to miss out of whatever that sadness might teach me. Maybe this sounds dark. I don’t mean it too. I laugh and smile on birthdays and what not too, joy teaches things as well, it just took me a while to figure out how to do so authentically. That’s what I’m getting at with all of this.

I don’t make big, elaborate plans for my birthday. Not because I’m a grouch, but because I know that the best days are the ones that you don’t plan. So when it happens to be my birthday, I don’t wake up and demand happiness. I wake up and notice how I feel like I would on any other day, and I go from there. I take the day as it comes. I do my favorite things and eat my favorite foods. I do whatever feels good. These past few years that has meant just spending the day with my family, getting coffee downtown or hanging out and cooking together to a really good playlist with all of the windows open. That’s what I love.

COMING THIS JULY: NEW YORK & ME

But this July I’m turning twenty-one. (whAt an appropriate post to reveal that I’m a cancer) And twenty-one in America is a big deal because we get to pretend that we haven’t been swilling down cheap wine and sketchy vodka for the past six years and that a whole new world has just opened up to us. You can go to war at eighteen but you can buy a beer. Anyway. The point is, this is a big birthday and it’s one that you typically spend with friends having the supposed time of your life, if you even remember it. At first, that made me feel kinda of sad because that’s not what I’m going to do. But then I thought about it and talked about it and realized that that tends to be a scripted show too.

I was talking to my neighbor about her own twenty-first birthday and this is what she told me. I had enough friends to fill out a dinner table and celebrate with, but they weren’t really my friends. Not my real ones. I didn’t have those yet. It wasn’t very much fun.

Well I don’t have those yet either. I don’t think that many young people actually do. I think that a lot of what goes on during these years is a production for an audience, and I don’t care for it. So instead of trying to fit in to some idea of what a twenty-first should look like, I’m going to spend the day as I always do, cooking and dancing and laughing with my family. And then, the very next day, I’m getting on a plane and flying to New York.

I’m running off to Brooklyn and Manhattan and the Lower East Side to buy myself a glass of wine for making it to twenty-one. Or maybe a cocktail. It’s been quite a ride. And then I’m going to gallivant around the city and get lost and talk to strangers and wear funky outfits and stare at art and write about what it all feels like. That’s how I want to celebrate being alive. Not by getting wasted in some club, but by actually living. Stay tuned.

Love, -m.

JOIN THE FUN

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