The sky shifts from dark to lighter blue as I head out the door and towards the bus. It’s the busiest week of the year and the excitement and tension of it has resulted in a pounding headache which I am hoping to shift by wading into ice. It is in moments like this, icy cold and a ground covered in snow, when I am reminded of the old me, the five years ago me, who considered any water below 25 degrees or any weather below 30°C as far too cold to even consider a swim. Now, I get undressed amongst the snow after almost skipping down the hill to the lake, outrageously excited to crouch in icy water and to listen to its gentle movement below the ice. The irony hits with the force of a comedic anvil.
The plan wasn’t to go again the next day but the water felt so good that I simply had to go back. And this time, I am the first at the lake and get to break the ice. I grab a large stick, break the first few paces with my feet, and then I beat at the thin layer of ice that has reformed over night. As I take another swing, I suddenly hear a whooping behind me and spot a runner with her arms raised, cheering me on. I must look unhinged when seen from the shore, a bikini-clad figure in a bobble hat wielding a large stick, but as I lower myself into the water under the pale pink sky, I feel more capable and more me than I ever do otherwise.
“In the middle of the lake, I'm completely present. I'm no longer afraid to be alone. I've conditioned myself to the lake, to the cold, to the pain of it. I can hold it. I've made it mine.”
― Jessica J. Lee, Turning
Birthdays are funny things. To celebrate them or not. To make a fuss or not. It’s a privilege to get older and be healthy while doing so and yet, they are a strange marker of time. I am halfway through a decade and in a way nothing has changed since I turned 30 five years ago. I cannot mark time the way other people might be able to, in properties acquired, children born or in marriage certificates signed. I am still doing the same job and still living in the same place. In a way, I haven’t accomplished anything that is viewed by society as an accomplishment. And for a weekend, I felt unsettled and pulled apart by that thought.
But we have all been stuck inside and robbed of time for much of these past five years. We’ve had plans cancelled or upended, dreams postponed. It was five years in normal time but ever since those pandemic days which somehow felt both empty and crowded, time seems to matter less and less. And with some people, time seems to become even more irrelevant. Some conversations over the past month which have felt five minutes long, somehow stretched to 90 minutes. A dinner with friends and amazing food has us sitting around the dinner table telling stories and laughing until we’re suddenly surprised by the late hour. With the right people, there is never enough time.
And there are other ways to mark time. Amy Key has said in a recent podcast that we should pay attention to the subtle changes, the changes that are meaningful for us as a person rather than the things that society tells us are important. And if I look for subtle changes over the past five years, there are myriad ones, even if there are no Hallmark cards for them.
Maybe most meaningful to me every day is the change that came after I confessed to a friend how lonely I felt after spending many years convincing myself that I had trained myself out of the feeling of loneliness. I confessed that I didn’t know how to rely on people and whether I could take the pain of trying but finding that there was no on there. He reassured me that I could be both independent and rely on people, that there was no either or. In the pandemic years that followed, when I had to be both fiercely independent but also really needed people, I thought of those words often. And even though it shouldn’t have been a surprise, when I allowed myself to try, I found that there were people and that I could let them in.
It struck me that this type of reflection, this assigning of importance to one's own journey through life, is a kind of love.”
― Amy Key, Arrangements in Blue
The night before my birthday, snow fell in tufts from an inky black sky. Two years before, snow fell on my birthday and heralded a good year and this time, too, I take it as a good sign. These weeks remind me a lot of the beginning of 2022. There was a sense of possibility then but for the first few weeks, it all felt undefined and uncertain. Like trying to grasp something that you know is there but somehow can’t see. I feel like this now.
The idea I’ve had almost a year ago now, of going out and searching for stories, to maybe, hopefully, turn them into a book, needs action now. And strangely, if one were to believe in signs and fate, then the universe has been busy reminding me, encouraging me, to finally take some steps towards that idea. There are flights to be booked, time to be found, budgets to be made and the not-so-small task of believing in my own fanciful idea. Being my own cheerleader for an idea that might seem extravagant, pointless, ridiculously expensive and probably doomed to fail, is what I struggle with the most.
“Remember: The rules, like streets, can only take you to known places. Underneath the grid is a field—it was always there—where to be lost is never to be wrong, but simply more.”
— Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
I spent my birthday with friends, eating homemade pizza and a cake full of candles. Before I got to make a wish, they sing and for a moment I don’t even know what to wish for because this moment itself feels like a wish come true.
For so much of my life I have felt so very wrong and like everyone else had been given a set of instructions that I never received. I have always felt both too much and not enough, have tried predicting everyone’s actions around me, while being completely befuddled by the sensory input that arrives in my brain until I feel as though I can see sound and feel everyone’s mood scratch my skin. It is difficult to get close to people when you constantly feel torn apart by the unspoken rules you do not understand. But about eight months ago, I learnt that my brain has never been broken, it has simply always been autistic.
So my wish for the next five years is to figure out what that diagnosis means for me. To figure out how to care less about the things I don’t have and revel more in the things that I do. I want to lie on my living room floor more often to listen to music or a podcast or an audiobook, to not always do but more often just be. I want to celebrate the things which are meaningful to me without feeling ashamed that they do not conform with society’s idea of success. I want to figure out how to let people in more often than I am shutting them out and I want to do that without always feeling that I am somehow doing it wrong. I want to make more art. And after so many people have recently told me that I seem happier and more content than they have seen me in a long time, I would like to be happy more often than I am sad.
Happy Birthday! I’m looking forward to reading you book one day!
Beautiful, beautiful words, that resonate so deeply.
Sending (slightly belated) happy birthday wishes to Berlin!
So glad I found your writing – please keep going ... I'm curious about that book! x