I feel like every time I update this blog, it's the middle of the night. I never seem to get around to it in the middle of the day, but when I can't sleep and dreadfully wish for something to do other than studying or staring at the shapes my furniture makes in the dark, I stumble upon these words.
There is something both exciting and trapping about birthdays. On the one hand, I have grown strangely comfortable with being 22, finally feeling like I can manage its demands, and then it ejects me out "there" into being 23, and I feel wholly ill-equipped to handle it. 23 sounds "adult" and "responsible" and like I should just KNOW the answer to any sort of question in the same way I thought I'd KNOW when I graduated college or when I got to college or when I became a teenager. I then realize, of course, that whatever this grand THING I am supposed to know is, I simply don't know it, which is cause for panic. I talk a good game, but I don't really feel like I've "made it" into the world of adults who just know things, like where they keep their income tax forms and whether it's going to rain tomorrow.
And there's the dingy side of birthdays, too, which is the opportunity for self-reflection, the "oh, but I never thought I would still be in this place by NOW" and "I should have ... and then by now I would have been..." This wishy-washy longing to be somewhere other than where I am now gets louder on "event" days like birthdays and holidays simply because I remember where I was 1, 2, 10 years ago at this time, which makes for an easy comparison. But the danger lies in being too close-minded when doing the comparison and forgetting that while I may not have made it to the moon yet, some damn good work has been done in the past few years. Where getting through the day was once a terrible struggle, I now find quite frequently that I enjoy myself. And in life, a little bit of joy goes a long way towards making life meaningful and pleasant and manageable. So let's not forget the growth in all the staring back at old camera reels.
So subtle sometimes, it comes, and yet so dramatic at other times. I've had to draw back from intense self-awareness because I used to over-analyze everything to the point of not understanding. As a child, I greatly feared skipping a single word or mark of punctuation when I read, so I would read and underline the same lines so many times that I tore holes in the pages. Focused, I was... but I could not have told you what on earth the "point" of the matter was. I had read every word five times, but I could not have expressed what the sentence was saying because I was too busy reading the commas. I do the same thing inside my head where I hyper-focus on something to the exclusion of being able to put it in perspective and see it. Taking something apart to understand it only works if you're able to put it back together when you're through. If you spend so long looking at the broken pieces and being fascinated by what each one does that you no longer remember where they fit in the puzzle, then you're left with a pile of scrap metal and no way to drive to work.
So I am trying to dis-engage from my head a little bit and check into my body, my life, my spirit, these non-intellectual pursuits that I get around to when I'm trying to avoid studying.
