It’s my 29th birthday! I feel good. I think I feel better than I’ve ever felt on any birthday prior. I feel powerful, I feel alive. I feel like I understand myself and my world better than I ever have, and all of my relationships with everything in my life are better than they’ve ever been. I feel ready. I feel confident, comfortable, at ease (even with my uneasiness).
What are these updates for? I’d like to think they’re for my future self to look back on. I can also have conversations with my past selves by comparing against past updates. (There’s some nuance there – how do you have a conversation with your past self, when your past self no longer exists in the world? Your past self, IMO, still exists in your mind. I feel like I’m always carrying my past selves with me. I wonder how many other people feel this way. I don’t think it’s ubiquitous.)
But I don’t currently feel a strong urge to have conversations with my past selves right now…? Let’s just take a quick glance at past birthday update word vomits:
- 0704 – turning 28 – “I do not want to grow up to be a cold cynical bastard. I believe that things can get better. […] We’re bad at talking about our feelings, we’re bad at being good to each other. I want to get better at it. I’m going to keep trying to transmute my sadness into a positive force for good. My sadness is a compass, reminding me to try my best to avoid causing suffering to others, to avoid being cruel myself. I will try my best.”
- 0672 – turning 27 – “How interesting is my life right now? How can I make it more interesting?” […] “Truth is good. Interesting is good. Good decisions are good. I should be moving towards those things. I don’t always, why?” […] “I’ve been writing in a sealed bubble here for a long time, but there’s something wonderful about answering other people’s questions and helping them work through their issues.”
- 0574 – turning 26 – “I am not too impressed with myself and my life so far. I have done some good things, but at a pace that I find somewhat mediocre. It’s time to pick up that pace. I believe that I am capable of more. I believe that I am capable of running faster, lifting heavier, sleeping better, writing sharper, assisting others… I can’t “have it all”, but I can have more all of the good things that constitute the good life in my estimation. I just need to shed my old thoughts and my old beliefs, and focus harder than I’ve ever focused before on the task at hand. There will be time for idling later. We will make time for idling as necessary. But for now– to action!”
- 0357 – turning 25 – “can’t keep languishing in self-pity and keep trying to squeeze out more praise from things that I’ve already done. I’m 25 years old now. I can’t keep hoping that mommy or daddy or senpai is going to recognize me. I have to recognize myself. I have to provide my own internal validation. I have to assemble and direct my own life, and I can’t keep hoping that other people will validate me for it. I mean, I consider the feedback of thoughtful, intelligent people to be a sign that things are going well, but the point is to focus on making things go well– not trying to squeeze positive feedback out of people who aren’t volunteering it. That’s a surprisingly challenging… challenge. Happy 25th, Visa.”
- 0163 – turning 24 “The past year has put me through more change than the past decade. Marriage. Home ownership. Employment. Bills. None of these were a part of my life 2 years ago, and now they are the most prominent, fundamental elements in it. They have forced me to face my weaknesses and shortcomings in a way that I never had to before, and they have similarly helped me become more clear about what my strengths are. […] I don’t know why I’m so stubborn. I just know that I am, and that’s a non-negotiable reality of my existence. And every day I try to negotiate, pretend that it might be different this time. And every day is the same. It’s boring. We need to plot a prison break from this monotone.”
Alright, so… that was interesting? Looks like I used to be less confident, and probably rightfully so. There’s a recurring motif of wanting to be more focused, more disciplined, to do more things, get more things done. Looking at it now with the benefit of hindsight, time and space… some of it feels like a kind of moral posturing, a sort of performative self-flagellation. I am not good enough, I need to be better. I am disappointing myself and others, I need to be less of a disappointment. And maybe there is some truth in that.
I… don’t really care, though! 😂 I kinda sensed that even before I went diving in. I feel like I spent many years churning – like, hammering away at the malleable metal of my mind, maybe. But now that I’ve done it, where I am right now, I’m not actually all that interested in how I got here. I might be interested if someone asks me about it, and I feel like it would be helpful to them, but it doesn’t feel like something that’s currently helpful to me. What would be helpful to me right now? I want to explore. I want to, as Ray Bradbury describes, “step on the landmine called me“, and explode into a brilliant flash of color and light. I want to explore aesthetics. I want to see and touch and smell and taste and feel things that I’ve never experienced before.
I do want to be decisive. But an interesting difference is… I feel like the last time I talked about it, I didn’t feel like I knew how to do that. Like it was something outside of the realm of possibility for me, like I was talking about a fantasy. But now I feel much more confident and comfortable. I recently flew halfway across the planet by myself, and had a great time. I left my job and I’ve been making money still. I feel loved, wanted, needed, appreciated. Luck is a variable here, but it’s also something that I’ve been actively working for, all my life. It feels good to be validated, from within and beyond.
We’re just getting started. 💪🏾❤️