Happy

It's one month until my birthday.

Unless you are blissfully out of contact with me outside of this blog, you probably know that I love my birthday. I love my birthday the way a five year old loves her birthday. I get excited for it months in advance. I buy a new birthday dress for my parties. I would wear a birthday crown if someone got one for me without any sense of irony whatsoever.

And, let's be honest. My birthday is at the end of September, but I pretty much treat the entire month--from Labor Day until the day after my party--as one whole ohmygodgiantparty. I'm serious. My current calender for the next month has me busy every weekend doing things I adore from star-gazing at a cabin to staying in a yurt drinking wine and singing Skinny Love to standing in the National Museum of Health and Medicine looking at the bullet John Wilkes Booth fired at President Lincoln and thinking about freedom and self-determination. All, of course, concluded with an immense party at the end of the month.

I love my birthday because 364 other days of the year I feel completely unremarkable. I mean, for God's sake, I've spent a significant portion of my life hoping to be recruited to the X-Men, of course an ordinary life doesn't measure up. I'm reasonably bright, but I'm never the smartest person in the room. The only times I'm the prettiest girl in the bar are the times I'm the only girl in the bar. I work hard, but I needed to install Procrastinator to keep myself from going off on web tangents. My birthday is the one day out of the year where none of that seems to matter.

I love my birthday.

***

I don't feel crazy. 

I seem to be having all of my brainstorms while making the bed. Perhaps my mother was on to something for my entire adolescence when she tried to get me to make it before school. I smile a little bit as I tug the quilt straight. I don't feel crazy.

A year ago, I told Kerry that I thought I needed to go into therapy. Stress had caused all of the undiagnosed anxiety and depression to flower into OCD years earlier, which had been getting progressively worse when added along with sheer loneliness. 

A year ago I finally realized that I was so crazy I could barely fake sanity anymore. 

It's this morning, making the bed before going to work that I realize it. 

 I'm not faking anymore. 

***

Do you need permission to be happy? 

The question actually catches me off guard. I've been trying to explain the fizziness I've been carrying around in my chest lately. I can vaguely remember being this person. The person whose enthusiasms took over her life, whose passions and interests were a little eclectic, but always pursued to mastery. Who, among the right people, was the human equivalent of a bottle of champagne. I remember this person. I loved this person.

I don't trust this person.

Why should I? She abandoned me when I needed her, badly, when I moved to the North Country. She left me behind and went off to party with her friends, only showing up when I needed to go to the Cities or to see my graduate school friends, and even then she was relatively more reserved.

Do you need permission to be happy? 

The question is still lingering. It is normally this is the kind of question that is calibrated exactly to instigate an emotional shut-down for me. I don't like presumption, even on the part of my friends, and I really don't like when they say something even remotely insightful that I haven't considered myself.

It's the kind of question that would normally have me sign off of chat, or feign a phone call from my mother and say my goodbyes. It's the kind of question that makes me pause and reconsider a friendship. It's the kind of question that, more often than not, makes me push someone back to an arm's length away. And I don't know if it's the physical distance or the confessional nature of a friendship conducted via a keyboard and computer screen, but when Preston asks, I don't blow him off. 

I don't answer either.

Instead, I say a silent prayer of gratitude that we're not video-chatters and reach for the Kleenex box.

Yes. 

***

The fizz hasn't evaporated yet. Part of me keeps thinking that it will. 

This is probably all birthday excitement. I tell myself. You'll go back to being an ohmygodunbearablecrazybitch on September 29th. My OCD symptoms, which are entirely gone now, will flare up again. I'll withdraw into myself and let loneliness and self-doubt become my constant companions again. 

But there's a tiny part of my brain, the part that exists somewhere between the effervescence and the moroseness that reminds me to think about last year, who cajoles me to remember what I wrote about how birthdays mark the passage of time, they celebrate the goals we've accomplished, they remind us of the work we still have left to do. 

Regardless of the fact that that Kelly was crazier than a shithouse rat, she was right. There's something about birthdays that makes them(or should make them) magical things. They're the day out of the year when you can put on your party dress and feel like the prettiest  girl in the room. Where you best a friend in an argument and bask triumphantly, momentarily, erroneously in the satisfaction of being the smartest person in the room. It should be a day when you don't think about having never exhibited a mutation or the relationships you've failed in over the past year. 

Birthdays should be the day of the year (month in some of our cases) that you feel that you've accomplished something in the preceding 364 days. Where you feel like whatever it was about the past year--whether it falling into/out of love, moving, keeping the same job you've had for years, is maybejustatinybitremarkable.  

At least, that's how I plan to celebrate this year.