Looking back, on my birthday

It’s my 28th birthday today, and I’m up early, thinking. Usually on my birthday I wake up excited, but today I’m feeling quietly grateful and… older. I’m just thinking about time, how little of it we have and how much, therefore, we need to make of it. It’s the first birthday in which I wake up seeing my future as a finite vista rather than an infinity of possibility. I don’t think of this in a negative way; it just is: it’s one more piece of the awareness that is our existence. I just didn’t expect to be quite so aware of it on this particular morning.

My 27th year has been a big one. Life is always full of change, but this has been a particularly transformative year. Last year, on my birthday, I was in LA Chinatown having my last lunch with the literacy staff. I had just quit my job, a thoroughly mixed bag of satisfaction and stress. We knew we were going to move, but we didn’t know when or where. I knew I wanted to make art, but wasn’t sure how to go about it. In March we were in San Pablo, launching our new, self-employed, Bay Area lives… by being sick for a week, having no internet, and not going out because everything was rainy and grey. By June, my stomach problems had mostly dissipated, I had started gardening and crafting, and I took my first drawing classes in Berkeley. By September, Al had moved to Ithaca, Shra and Devin were engaged, I’d decided to do a family history, and I was in full-on preparation mode for my first craft fair. And here I am a year later, and my life is totally different. I have a shop. I can draw. I’m working on my family history, and I’ve started a novel. I take singing lessons and go to the climbing gym. I can dance again, more or less. I’m building up my new social life in the Bay Area, and I see my family regularly (but not too regularly).

All this sums up the changes that have taken place in this past year, and yet it doesn’t. I feel different. I think partly it’s because we’re back in the Bay Area after having lived elsewhere. Partly it’s that owning a business makes me see all kinds of things in a new way. And largely it’s that, being self-employed and free to live as I please, I think a lot more deeply about my place in the world and how I’m spending my time. When I was in school, my life was planned by others; all the steps were already laid out for me, along an assumed trajectory, and as long as I followed those steps, I was supposed to be fine. When I was working, I also had a position and a purpose — both the ones defined for me by the organization, and the ones I defined for myself within their parameters. But now, I’m about as much a free agent as a person can be in this world, and it’s a 100% different life. I knew it would be awesome and liberating, and probably scary, but what I didn’t realize was that it would be such a responsibility, and that I would feel this responsibility deeply and think about it all the time. I quit these other paths — school, employment, even volunteering — so I could make my own way and shape the place I wanted to hold in this world. Is that not scary?! That means I need to find my best place in the world and make my way vigorously toward it, even as my target is ever-changing, even when it seems impossibly far.

I guess what I realize today — knowledge I’ve been slowly coming to for months — is that in choosing to live my life by my own decisions, I made a commitment, with all the obligations and responsibilities that entails. And unlike some commitments, it’s not one I can ever go back on; even if I went back to working for pay, or going to school, I’d still have this sense of responsibility to myself and to the universe, to use my time as fully as possible.

I was going to try and include here how my outlook has changed too, how I really do feel a dual sense of commitment to myself and to the world/to others, but I have to leave for yoga. I’ll write more later. In the meantime… happy birthday, me.

I love you all. 🙂