My birthday is this Friday. I’ll be turning 22.
I walked passed someone in the supermarket the other day while having a mental breakdown over the price of canned beans.
Don’t mind me, I said. I’m having a mid-mid-life crisis.
I’m just more emotional these days than usual and I can’t tell if it’s the age or rotations of the planets.
I think back to around this time in 2017. Right before I started this blog.
I remember not doing much with someone who wasn’t much to remember, feeling unimportant on my birthday.
I had turned 19. A not-so-special year.
I remember afterward, never wanting to feel like that again. Like that day didn’t matter.
Because even though it is just another day, it is a day to celebrate you. And you matter.
I think back to when I felt as if 2017 was a nothing-much of a year.
That was the year I had left home;
a year of feeling lost and hopeless–yet, fearless and deep.
The year I first heard the Tao.
A year of poetry and sunsets, new found love and hidden pains within.
I think about how much I actually wrote that year. How much I had discovered.
The meaning behind me saying all of this is well, I had a similar thought a little while ago.
I thought,
Why does it matter what I do? My birthday doesn’t matter. It’s just another day.
And I remembered how I felt that year, turning 19 and nothing else.
And that sadness seeped from the past into my present heart. And I cried.
Not a ridiculous one like in the canned goods isle last week, but a soft cry—enough to make me decide that it does matter what I do.
And it’s not only another day, but the day I was born.
So,
I’ll be 22 this Friday.
And no matter what I do or who I’m with, it’s a day worth celebrating.
-Natalia