Sharktopus Cakes and Birthdays

Sharktopus. Obviously.

I'm a big birthday person. I like to make a big fuss and construct ridiculous cakes for people and make sure they know they are insanely special. If surprises are not involved, it is not a proper birthday.

For my own birthdays, I usually schedule something I always mean to do, but haven't made time for. Camping trips or road trips or anything involving a costume.

But it's weird to turn 29 when your brother didn't turn 26.

Go ahead. Wear a costume to that. 

The feeling of it in my body was one of being boarded up. I was boarded up like an abandoned building, and somehow, this little shoot of green pressed through a nearly-invisible gap in the wood. The shoot pushed through. I turned 29. Weirdly, my life continues to go on.

James. Smiling like a pro bro.

Let's review year 28. I was called "doctor" for the first time not entirely in jest. This seemed to matter significantly more to other people than to me. I fell in love in a much more profound way than I ever had before and then later pondered the uncomfortably uncanny similarities between the man I still loved and James from the bachelorette. I traveled across the country and the ocean, even spending two and a half months in the state I no longer lived in. I apparently had a dream job. Which I didn't always feel very dreamy about. But that later seemed disarmingly fantastic again. I began a new life in a new place. Which was really a continuation of an old life in an old place I had vowed to never return to. My brother died. But the rest of my family didn't. Though Bandit almost did. And sometimes it felt like they did too. I wrote half of a novel. Despite publishing none of my dissertation. I am 75% of the way done with becoming certified in energy medicine. For the first time in ten years I will be living in the same apartment for more than 12 months. And I decided the Vampire Diaries was a pretty good show.

If all of that doesn't make you look at yourself and wonder, I just don't know what would.

TWENTY-NINE is the last big chance to make a mark before your thirties. In your thirties, I am told, you have to panic about why you're still single, and what is wrong with you, and if all the good ones have already been taken. You also have to think seriously about how the eggs in your ovaries are practically disintegrating with each breath you take, and whether or not it's time to take freezing a few very seriously. Never mind that you will never get to brag again about all of the amazing things you did at a younger age than everyone else. "Oh, you got your Ph.D. in your thirties? I got my combined J.D./Ph.D./MPH in my twenties. I'm trying to subtlety indicate to you that I'm the next Einstein. Except smarter." But when you're still in your twenties, you have a chance to do all of those things AND MORE and reassure yourself that it means you have figured life out finally. What a relief. You will not die alone with a beer belly watching re-runs of The Price Is Right. Your twenties are your evidence.

No one wants to go into their thirties without a good bag of evidence.

But when I look back at the last year, one thing strikes me above all else. No matter how bummed I feel that I didn't publish ANY of my dissertation. No matter how sad I am that I apparently should stop letting Bandit weigh in on who I date, because he is not helping. No matter how hard it was to wake up literally one hundred times and ask what the heck I was doing with my life...

Bandit Helping with Dating Choices

My year was Jam Packed.

It was.

I could not have crammed one more thing in.

And do you know what that means?

It means I was living.

I was living. And I still am. Apparently. Because I am 29. 

It felt so weird when this birthday happened. I watched more TV this year and spent more time alone in my house than I probably had in the last five years combined. I felt like I did almost nothing.

But really, I was just compensating. In practical terms, I don't see how I could have asked for anything more to fit into a twelve-month period. I needed a bajillion hours alone to just begin to balance out and process everything else. This last year is not how I want any other years to go. It isn't.

But what can I do?

If I got to be in charge, my brother wouldn't be dead. If I got to run the show, I'd be in a great relationship with a full partner. If I had my way, Bandit would still be leaping onto the back of my couch, no pee dribble in his wake. Shoot, I would have written the ENTIRE novel, instead of only the parts I was ready to face.

This is life. I no longer believe in strength as the ability to handle a lot. I think of strength as the ability to be flexible. It is about being able to handle different things. Especially the unexpected things. Especially the unwanted things. Whatever eats a hole in your stomach or makes your heart feel like it has fallen out of your chest. That is what separates out people who move forward and those who get stuck. (I say this not entirely sure which category I fall into). Flexibility. Not force. Movement. Not power. Flow. Not holding on.

I mean, I got annoyed when my New York hotel room was too hot and the wifi wasn't working. I had to have things my way, right away. That's not flexibility. That's rigidity. If I can't handle twenty minutes on the phone with tech support, there are going to be a lot of rocky moments awaiting me on a daily or even hourly basis.That is what being stuck is. It's a way of making things harder than they need to be. It's refusing to accept that things are what they are, and then throwing a tantrum that you didn't get to create them in your image. I can't handle broken wifi? Shoot. How will I get through my next funeral? Because, at some point, there will be one. There will be article rejections, job rejections, relationships that don't go how I'd hoped and maybe a permanently incontinent dog in my future.

Still, I have compassion for stuckness. We all have our own natural viscosity.

I have become intimately aware of my own.

But despite that, these last couple of weeks of traveling have reminded me that there is an entire world out there just beyond my futon and television. And in that world, among so many people, there is a palpable sense of possibility. For a new life. New love. New colleagues. New beginnings. The cynic in me just can't seem to stay in charge. I must have met at least three strangers on the streets of New York, who I'll never see again, that I asked myself if they might not just be the person I'd like to spend the rest of my life with.

This may either mean I'm 1. a twelve year old girl, or, 2. that I have rediscovered that even in the face of impossibility, I can't help but see the possible.

Either way, I came home to my little man, who is as much my puppy as ever. And I'm excited to begin again. Think about how much potential year 29 likely has in store for me?!

Who cares what I didn't get done this year? If the best time to plant a tree was thirty years ago. The second best time is today.

You can start something today too if you'd like. https://chopracentermeditation.com/programs/index

Maybe you have a reason to stare down a little bit of your suffering too. Either way, having attended a two-day talk on quantum physics, I am now convinced: we really are completely in all of this together, whether we want to be or not.

And I can't help it. That makes me smile a little.

So happy birthday to me. 

Namaste.