This is 42.

9/29/21  |  2.5m Read

Today is my birthday. 42. 

The age my mom was when I graduated high school. I remember thinking anyone over the age was 30 was practically terminal and certainly no longer sexually active, which my father continued to remind me of until the very end. 

I remember birthdays being special in our family. Nothing grand or ridiculous, just unique and personal and totally sustainable. You always got to pick dinner (spaghetti and dad’s garlic bread for me, BBBs for my bro), and you got to eat cake for breakfast the next day and sometimes cold pizza – it was fun, I remember it. There would be presents, I’m sure, and other moments that were celebrated throughout, and still the parts I remember most are when our parents made us the centerpiece of the day. 

Perhaps that’s why I love a birthday – mine, yours, everyone’s – I love getting a whole day to consider you, to cherish you, to celebrate you. Glorious.

I’ve always spent time looking back on these birth days of mine. Reflections on what the year’s past held. I imagine there’d be lots adventure and connection, there’d be much gratitude, and a budding practice of grace. There’d be love and longing, regret and reflection, and there’d be endless daydreams and hope. 

This year, I wonder if all I would see is grey. 

For while I feel tired, tender, and tenuous, I also feel bolder, more real, and most grateful. This year I feel terribly conflicted, overwhelmed, and to some degree frozen, and I also feel enormously abundant and grateful and newly present. I feel full of self doubt and enormous self sabotage and big fat barriers, and I also feel talented and abundant and deeply proud. 

So here I sit – 9/29/21 – dead smack in the spirit of Libra, indecisiveness already inherent. 

I begin to understand a more nuanced system within myself. I begin to recognize that I carry some hurts, some wounds, some memories from my past. I begin to see that in the presence of all the loss and chaos of life as of late, I have needs that are popping out of the boxes I’ve stuffed them into for all these years. 

In my fourth decade, I feel this enormous ambiguity between avoidance and gentle confrontation as a means to process my shit – the good and the bad.

And I am know wise and brave enough to embrace this idea that acknowledging and tending to my – 

• grief and childhood – dare I say – trauma, 
• marriage and mamahood, 
• dreams and talents, 
• patterns and coping.

I will heal. I will move through my ambivalence. I will embrace my meaning when, for the first time in life, I make the space to really experience my story, feel my past, and celebrate all the parts of me that have gotten me here. 

Into my 43rd year, I carry my need for balance and concede a little need for control. 

Through these efforts and with the guidance of a profoundly wise and talented professional – I am learning to really embrace all these tumultuous parts of myself with endless creativity and compassion and a new clarity. I aim to build a sustain that celebrates my connectedness and perhaps a new confidence in the relationship with my truest self. I want to encourage a practice that embraces calm, clarity, and deep curiosity within my truest self.

Today, at my midpoint, I will reflect on my first half and integrate whatever I discover as long as I am able. 

As a birthday gift to myself, I am going to pause and really love on myself for 15 minutes. I’m likely to cry and dance around, and probably connect with a few who I hold most dear. It will be precious moment to celebrate who I am and who I am becoming.

How will you celebrate yourself today? When will you make the time? What would you want to share about this moment? Jot it down and tell your story @extheornow