Happy Birthday

I love my birthday.

People who have known me for a long time know how much I love my birthday. Thankfully, the people who have known me for a long time are also tremendously kind, and are willing to indulge me and my borderline obnoxiousness in the weeks running up to the actual date.

I love my birthday for a lot of reasons. Mom and Dad always worked hard to make the day special when I was growing up, so there are good memories associated with it. These days I love any excuse to wear high heels and a dress and drink champagne with my friends. I love taking a whole day to celebrate the sheer improbability of my own existence and the fact that I was born in a place and time where I could make a big deal out of it.

But what I love most about my birthday, what I love even a little more than attention and love and presents and champagne is the chance to pause. I like holidays that give me a chance to reflect and consider where I've been and where I'm going. This year's birthday is no different, although instead of mulling over the past year, I seem to be stuck contemplating a much younger version of myself.

This year I seem to be fixated on my adolescence. It's unsurprising, really. Starting therapy has caused me to reexamine old behaviors. My favorite book from high school has recently been made into a movie and is receiving a lot of press. I've been rereading my old journal for kicks. These are all part of my musings over the past few months, but I think part of the reason I'm so focused on my adolescent self, particularly my eighteen year old self, is simply the passage of ten years.

Eighteen was a big year for me. I had my first boyfriend (the previously mentioned math tutor.) I read The Great Gatsby and The Razor's Edge, and Hamlet for the first time. I had a teacher who, quite literally, changed my life. I got my driver's license and one of my closest friends came to live with my family for a time. I decided I could be a writer. I began to make plans for my life, picking twenty-eight as the logical time by which I could measure how far I had come.

By twenty-eight, I would have had my Ph.D. in Literature from Columbia for two years, completing my degrees straight through. I would be living in Chicago, possibly Milwaukee, teaching for one of the large Jesuit universities and working on publishing my third book of poems. I would be causing a dust-up in the Roman Catholic tradition by becoming a married lady priest. My husband and I would be celebrating our sixth wedding anniversary, and he too would be working on a final manuscript--one of his many novels. Our ten month old would be potty-trained and we'd have plans for another kid around my 29th birthday. Our family pictures would include our golden retriever, Atticus, and like our C.V.'s, would make our friends and family unspeakably jealous.

These achievements had a lot to do with how I pictured my perfect life. They were goals that were achievable with a certain amount of work. They had enough material earmarkers of success so I would know that I achieved something, but required enough spiritual and intellectual hard work to make them worth working toward. Even at eighteen I was entirely preoccupied by the idea of perfection.

I'm still obsessed by the idea of perfection. It's one of the dirty secrets of people with OCD. We ache for perfection and ways to measure progress and as a result can be incredibly hard our ourselves when we don't achieve it. And my late twenties looks like anything except perfection. It looks like paying rent and student loans, working some seventy-hour weeks. Sometimes it looks like eating mac and cheese out of the pot, standing up in the kitchen because I'm too tired to think. It looks like living alone and feeling really fucking lonely sometimes. It looks like going to a therapist to help sort out some of the mental chaos I've been trying to suppress for twenty-eight years. It looks like the occasional OkCupid date and wondering how it is that a smart, funny, articulate girl could end up going out with such weirdos. It's having my heart broken so many times I've actually lost count.

It also means Top 40 dance parties in one friend's basement one weekend and playing with another friend's ten month old baby another. It means discovering that the process of getting a Ph.D. sucks and it's not really what I want to do. It's realizing that while I may not have my life partner yet, I have friends I love, respect, and admire, and that I still sometimes get that giddy, free-fall feeling when you meet someone new and you really click. There's the illusion, which I don't think ever gets any less satisfying, that I've finally managed to figure myself out.

This year I'm going against every instinct and every compulsion I have and not making a list of what I want to accomplish by the time I'm thirty-eight. I want to, desperately. I want to reform my ideas of perfection and set new standards for myself so I can take stock at the end of the next ten years. But as much as I want to set out my rubric for the next decade, I'm not going to do it.  This is, perhaps, the biggest gift that I've received this year, surprisingly one that came as a result of a mental health diagnosis. This life isn't a series of things to crossed off a a to-do list, and that I'm never going to be 100% happy with the life I'm living.

It sounds a little grim, I know, but for the first time in almost-twenty-eight-years, I feel like I can let go of the idea of perfection and finally be me.

Happy birthday.