On turning fifty-three years old

Noticings

It's been almost five years since the last crucial bricks fell out of my former belief system, the whole thing came crashing down around me, and I began sorting through the dusty rubble.

Last spring, I finally had the internal strength to walk away from social media. I had wanted to do so for over a year. I haven’t missed it for one millisecond; I've reclaimed so much of my life.

Related to that, I'm fully inhabiting my right to privacy, finally experiencing what most of the people I know have taken for granted all their lives.

I’m embodying my boundaries. No longer fighting for them and failing to hold them, I'm living from them matter-of-factly. Boundaried is as boundaried does.

Related to that, all my close relationships without exception are now reciprocal, respectful, and loving. Healthy relationship dynamics feel normal to me now. I don't need the other kind.

Running was my anxiety med since 2019. Now I'm barely running (coming back from yet another injury), and I don’t have anxiety.

Zoloft was my backup anxiety med for most of last year. I weaned off Zoloft in the late fall of 2024, and I don’t have anxiety.

Christmas of 2024 was the first Christmas during which I did what I wanted to do and didn't do what I didn't want to do. It's also the first Christmas I enjoyed.

My self-mistrust and self-sabotage game has been fierce for as long as I can remember. Two examples apropos to the context: I remember internally collapsing and bursting into tears in 2021 when a friend suggested I enter a local photography contest. I remember internally collapsing and bursting into tears in 2023 when the fourth or fifth friend attempted to teach me how to use a real camera. This month, nine months after finally beginning to conceive of myself as a legit artist, I took the next baby step in photography. I’m not telling you what the baby step was, because it feels good not to. Right to privacy.

Last Sunday, I went to a church for the first time in more than six years. I was looking for a cohesive local community that is positioned to be of service in ways I can join, a community that doesn't require an entry fee of parts of oneself. It didn't feel, smell, or sound like the churches I spent the first forty-six years of my life in. I felt genuine openness and warmth, like home. I want to go back.

This is the first birthday I can remember not experiencing simultaneous emotions of craving for affirmation and skin-crawling shame when people wish me a happy birthday. It was just something that happened today. I didn't need it to happen, and it didn't bring any emotions other than, “Oh, it's lovely to hear from so-and-so!”

There's more, but I’ve stayed up so late on my birthday night to write this that I’m falling asleep between sentences.

It's been a year of release, of escapade and discovery, of falling into my body, of safe-connection-building, of being more than doing, of a growing sense of embodied quiet confidence that I can live without fear of fucking up. I intend to go on fucking up; I'm just not terrified of it anymore.

Thank you to all of you who have shared life space with me this past year.

Photo credit: Abigail Smith

Artwork by Mia Painter

Photo taken at Climbers Run

Been listening on repeat: Independence by Marian Call

You found a patch to call your own, but

You cannot raise a barn alone

You cannot raise a barn alone

And I curse the burden made you think you should

And I curse the blind spot made you think you did