Birthday reflections

Today is my birthday (I’m 18!), and aside from getting to joke around about my real age (I’m 22!), which I won’t disclose here (but is closer, say, to 30 ((ahem))), I also get to indulge in some mildly self-pitying reflection, which I generally eschew. (Self-reflection is de riguer, of course; it’s the self-pity I try to avoid.)

Last night I dreamt that PW’s old art director, Jeff, had long ago had a romantic relationship with my boyfriend, Vince. They’d lived together back in the ’80s or ’90s, but then Vince realized he wasn’t gay, so they split up.

But then they saw each other again, and spent time together, and Vince realized he was indeed gay, and would be moving back in with Jeff. Because I like Jeff so much, and because I’m very pro-gay, I felt I wasn’t allowed to have any of the emotions I might have had if Vince simply ran off with another woman. No, in this case I had to be generous and loving about it, and feel happy for Vince that he was finally discovering who he truly was. I thought about the great opportunity I’d be afforded for activism. I could write an article called “My Boyfriend Left Me Because He’s Gay—and I Support Him Completely!”

But despite my P.C. beliefs, I was devastated. Jeff understood how hard it was for me, and he took me into his house, where a friend fed me juniper berries to make me feel better. They comforted me, but I couldn’t stop crying. “I know it’s good that he’s gay and finally coming to terms with that,” I wailed verbosely. “But I’ll miss him!” And this would prompt an explosion of tears and the frantic consumption of more berries.

When I woke this morning my face was covered with tears and I was actually crying. Of course, in the light of the morning, the dream seemed ridiculous, and yet I still felt sad. And when I wake up crying, which is at least once a week, I can’t shake the sadness. It lingers for the rest of the day.

To make things worse, I did something a woman should never do on her birthday: I tried on a pair of pants to see if they still fit. Clearly, I was possessed by a demon at that moment. They were pants I don’t even want to wear till the fall, but I thought, “I feel like I’m gaining weight. Is it possible I’m not? I’ll try these tiny H&M pants to see.” Naturally, they didn’t fit. I pulled and scrunched until my eyeballs were ready to pop, and still no progress. Finally, I threw them on the floor and put on a different pair of H&M pants—linen ones, and we all know how forgiving linen is.

Between the dream and the pants I was ready to slit my throat, and it wasn’t even 9 a.m. I binged on peanut butter, straight from the jar, and gloomily read about the gloomy world in Newsweek and Time, thinking, “Dear God, I hope no one ever bans anonymous sources altogether. These magazines would have to fold.” This also bummed me out, unaccountably, as did a rotten blueberry I mistakenly ate.

To give myself some perspective on life, I did what I always do when I’m feeling down: contextualize. My pain isn’t any greater than anyone else’s, I thought. I’m lucky, and here’s why:

•I’m not on a German U-boat like the guys in Das Boot, a movie I watched last night.
•I’m not epileptic, as is a character in David B.’s graphic novel Epileptic, which I’m reading right now.
•I don’t have tardive dyskenisia, like the guy on the trolley I sometimes see whose head jerks uncontrollably.
•I’m not a soldier in Iraq, like the guy who wrote The Last True Story I’ll Ever Tell, which I recently read.
•I’m not Joan Didion, who in the last year lost both her husband and her daughter, and whose exquisitely rendered Year of Magical Thinking would make anyone think twice about self-pity.
•I’m not Britney Spears.
•I’m not in a psych hospital, homeless, drug addicted or grievously ill.
•I’m not in the ward they call “the Hood” in a Philadelphia hospital, which if you read PW’s cover story by Steven Wells, is like waking up on the wrong side of the bed in Jacob’s Ladder.

All true, yet not quite enough, believe it or not, to mitigate the pants incident. So I looked into the sugar glider cage to catch a glimpse of the babies that have just emerged from their mother’s pouch. They’re each the size of an index finger, maybe smaller, and they can’t open their eyes yet. They were squirming over each other, and grooming themselves, which I found somewhat amazing. They have no sense of the outside world, but their instinct tells them to keep clean, which I’m sure is to keep them healthy. I stared at them for a long time, and then one of them yawned, which was so cute, I had to do some deep breathing.

And that gave me some perspective. These two little lives—they know nothing of pants that don’t fit or journalists who rely too heavily on anonymous sources. They only know the essentials: breathing, health, fatigue, hunger, warmth. And I’m breathing. And I’m healthy—or at least well medicated. And I have a soft bed and a roof over my head and more food than I need (hence the pants) and even central air and heat.

For those things, I’m grateful. And aren’t those the things that really matter? The rest is gravy. (Preferably gravy on a cheesesteak.)

[My dad took this photo of me many years ago. I'm grateful that—except for the fact that I cut my hair more fashionably now—I look pretty much the same, even at 26! Tee hee.]

liz | 10:29 AM | Uncategorized