Pre-Birthday Rants
When Gratitude Feels Like Gaslighting
I don’t know what I have to show for the last 48 years. Generational trauma is too easy of an answer and the lack of meaningful memories doesn’t tell the full story.
But I am alive and healthy-ish and I should be grateful. Some people don’t survive this long.
Some people don’t get to have 4 decades of feeling lonely.
Some people don’t get the luxury of rejection, abandonment, and shame.
So yea, I need to lean into my gratitude since emotional distress is proof of being alive even if it’s not an example of living a life.
I have another birthday coming and I’m settling into what feels like the 3rd act of my life. I don’t know if it’s time to throw in the towel. I don’t want to surrender because to do so would mean I have leverage to compromise on.
I don’t feel like I have a life to give up on.
I’m going through a first house Pluto transit and I wonder if that’s why I feel like a spinster phoenix, rising with a clinky knee and smoking the ashes of regret.
Where do we go when we can’t go back for a do over?
How do we reinvent ourselves when we don’t have a self to reimagine?
My anxiety has been out of control and it reflects in the ways I walk in the world. But I can’t help but wonder if I am going through a spell of uncertainty or if my pure existence was accidenttal and as a result I can only survive in chaos.