People wished a “Happy Birthday”, I get the sweetness, I get the sentiment, I get the intention. It just wasn’t my experience. My experience was more than that. More than plastering on a smile to appear happy, to appease any other people so they would feel safe and comfortable and not threatened or challenged and not feeling that they would have to swing into Rescue/ Fix mode so they could “Make me happy” and then everything would be ok…. I Never ask for fixing. I just happen to have access to Wider/ Deeper more varied emotions than just surface level Happiness. I swim in the waters of Deep allowing. Without masks or veils or filters. What this looks like is minute by minute living. Deep allowing of what is present to be present without pushing anything away in violence.
Therefore, a Lot of my Birthday included wet cheeks as tears tumbled profusely. Not for an age- I truly do not mind numbers, not for a date in a calendar, not for who did or didn’t provide external validation with marking this date, not for what I did or didn’t do on the date or who with or so much more.
A lot of the tears were for Previous birthdays and times where I wore masks. People looking externally would have thought I was Very happy. (They would have thought this most of the time I think.) I filled my time with all sorts of beautiful adventures as Actually, I had a Gaping hole inside and I was Desperate to fill it with Anything basically so I didn’t have to sit and face the emptiness. I felt the Volume and Expanse of time where I pretended to be Happy and made do or put up with all that was. All this pretense pushed what really wanted to move deeper into my tissues.
There was Such a sense of Freedom in allowing the abundant tears, to Really Feel Sadness, to feel it completely. To feel Sorrow and grief and discomfort and pain and trauma. To feel beneath everything to the raw alive shakiness without labels. There was no suffering, no attachment to the stories and thoughts, just the presence of something very wildly alive. There was Such relief in allowing that opening into what was beneath.
I went for a massage, the first bodywork I’d had this year. The tears fell as I acknowledged how my body craves and needs and desires to be touched and this is not part of my life right now and hasn’t been for a Long time and my body feels Starved for touch. This session cost nearly a whole weeks benefit allowance that I had been carefully saving as a birthday treat and was the first nurturing treatment I’d had this year. I felt Such enormous gratitude for being able to have this precious capital to pay for this treatment. My body has had an experience of absolute abundance of trauma move through it (several people have noted my symptoms have been like post traumatic stress syndrome) and I have been surfing the entire experience without medication or therapy or hands on bodywork.
I shared a lunch with two dear friends and later went to my meditation class. So there were no balloons, no alcohol, and just 1 little cup cake. It felt strange but very real and alive. Like many other days, this day too came and went and I am better for all of the gifts that were shared, no matter what wrapping they came in.