Birthdays & Bizarre Beauty

As I sit here on my 26th birthday, I can’t help but reflect. For some reason, I’ve never been a big fan of birthdays. Even when I was a kid, they never felt like they lived up to the hype of what everyone expects it to be. I find a lesson in there to be that a day that is supposed to be all about you, doesn’t feel the most fulfilling because that isn’t the true nature of life, our story shouldn’t be all about us in the end. But, that isn’t what this entry is about. 

I find myself looking around a mostly empty 3 bedroom apartment as I wait for my roommates to join me in a few days and find myself more at peace as I savor a Honeycomb ice cream than I have on any other birthdays in recent memory where I’ve been surrounded by friends, girlfriends, or family. That is not meant to be a slight to any of those wonderful people who were celebrating with me at those times, but a pure observation on the state of our internal battle. After all, we are our own harshest critic when we lay our head down on the pillow every night. And many of those birthdays, I felt it was another year that had passed me by on the direct route to mundanity. Even with plenty of accomplishments year after year, the idea of time gone by in a relatively comfortable existence started to scare me. What I didn’t realize is that, many days in those years, I was searching. Searching for something new, something that might push me down and leave me with no answers, something that truly makes me desperate to get out of bed in the morning and attack another day, something that might make me find a real smile I can’t wipe off my stupid fucking face. 

So what makes this one different, you might ask? You’re probably thinking ‘dude, you’re sitting in an empty apartment eating ice cream by yourself on your birthday… you aren’t even close to having it figured out!’ And you’d be absolutely right. But, at least I’m on the hunt again, instead of sitting on the sidelines of comfort like I did for many years. I suppose my takeaway here is that if you’re searching, the worst thing you can do is be idle. Try something new, go somewhere and sit alone and don’t pretend to scroll instagram like a spineless cuck because you don’t have the audacity to be a vulnerable human anymore. Maybe, it’ll be a great mistake, maybe it’ll be an absolute home run beyond anything you could have fathomed previously. You really never know, but I do know one thing. Either way, it’s worth celebrating the effort. Keep searching and trying new things until you can feel comfortable enough being one of those jackasses who looks themself in the mirror every morning and says, yep, I have all the answers and will tell everyone I come across that I do! Hah, yeah… the hunt never ends.