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Because my birthday is in January, I save the retospectives and resolutions for the morning of. I snap a selfie once I’m awake enough to get one I like, but there’s no pretense, I don’t do my hair or put myself through a bunch of filters that make me look younger than I am. One of the cooler things about being so very middle aged is that I’m all, “Fuck it, this is what you get. This is who I am. Face value, yo.”<\/p>\n
This morning I am at my friend’s house in rural Virginia. I have a wicked sore throat and shortly, we are off to the urgent care clinic to make sure I don’t have strep. (Yay, it’s just a virus.) The clinic doesn’t take my insurance, so it’s going to cost me a stupid amount of money for a three minute office visit, after which they will hand me a ten dollar package of antibiotics. The US appears to be going to war with Iran, a move I’m convinced is based in the Evangelical Industrial Complex (which I realize makes me sound kind of paranoid\/crazy but…). There is a lot going on and I am very much transitioning out of what my life has been for the last five years into whatever is next.<\/p>\n
I can’t control many of these things. The government. Our national health insurance idiocy. The dark circles under my eyes. They happen no matter what I do. So it would be easy to feel negative about the future right now, but for the first time in many years, I am feeling strangely optimistic.<\/p>\n
I don’t know if you’ve ever felt like your life had somehow got away from you. If you have, I do not recommend a lengthy black depression as a gateway to reclaiming your exisitence, but it seems that’s what happened to me. I feel a little bit like you do when you come out of a dark theater blinking in the sunshine, or maybe like when Dorothy lands in Oz and everything is in color after a long season of black and white.<\/p>\n
All kinds of things are happening that make me quite aware that I’m no longer 30, or 40 even, I am so very of my 50s right now. And while it would be so nice to reclaim the packaging of my 30s, I am okay — no, better than okay — with most everything else. My work. My creative life. The place I have chosen to be my home. Yes, of course there are things that I want to change, of course there are loose ends from this last run of uncertainty, but for the first time in many years, I am facing my personal New Year feeling optimisitc about what’s to come.<\/p>\n
Happy birthday to me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Because my birthday is in January, I save the retospectives and resolutions for the morning of. I snap a selfie once I’m awake enough to get one I like, but there’s no pretense, I don’t do my hair or put myself through a bunch of filters that make me look younger than I am. One … <\/p>\n