It’s My Birthday and I’m Going To Feel the Ache
The grief and love we carry; the grief and love that carries us.
It’s my birthday on Saturday, my 25th, so I’ve been cramming in all of my adolescent lessons before my brain is officially an adult’s. I don’t know how I’ll feel on my birthday yet, or even what I’ll do, and I’m trying to forget my expectations. I’m learning that having expectations interferes with the spontaneous synchronicity of life that I love to experience so much. I guess I can just wait and see what happens, like I try to do every day.
I don’t really want to be celebrated, but if you want to offer me a book deal or send me long emails about what you’ve been pondering, please go ahead.
All of my childhood birthdays were spent in the pool, with angel food cake and chocolate frosting, and endless rounds of Colors1 and Marco Polo. I stopped having parties when I was 13, because eating disorders don’t like to have fun or feel good, and thus don’t remember what happened on the birthdays after that until I turned 21; I bought beer and a burrito from a Chipotle in New Hampshire, and spent the night with six of my coworkers who had the same day off. We all slept in one hotel room; I’m sure they sang to me and we stayed up doing nothing but talking shit about the job we had started three days prior. That summer job eventually initiated my move to Chicago, where I spent my 23rd birthday: taking care of babies, and then attending a beach picnic hosted by someone whom the person I was dating was also dating (lesbians are dramatic); it was cold and overcast that day; my friend Mina and I were the only ones willing to jump in the lake.
Last year, 24, I had a very sweet birthday, despite my life feeling otherwise very chaotic—I’d just moved into a new apartment, which I would leave four months later, and had become suddenly terrified of being poisoned by lead paint that hid deep in the walls. I was cleaning constantly, waking up several times a night, paranoid and underfed and confused about why I felt so awful. It must be the lead paint, was my mind’s incorrect conclusion. On my birthday, a Friday, I took the girls I nannied to the trampoline park; I bought them neon slushies, and they made me a beaded bracelet that read “GIRLS * RULE”. My friend Kira roasted a chicken that evening; we sat outside on the porch with homemade ice cream, and I remember feeling so loved, so full, so grateful. Chicago summers are why everyone bears the winters: they’ve got some special kind of magic to them.
Right now, a few days before the end of this year’s cycle, I feel…the ache. The oooof. The breath out all the way until you are empty, and see what’s leftover, ache. The soft pressure behind the eyes, internal dampness, tender to the touch, ache. I’ve felt the ache all week—the growing pains of my spirit, maybe. I ache for the people and moments I’ve loved that are gone; I ache for the people and moments that are not yet here. I ache for all that is here.
When the ache comes, I try to let it stay. I try to let it go. It might be grief. It might be something else. As
wrote most recently, “We grieve what’s gone which is another way of saying we really loved the time it spent in our hands…There is plenty to grieve because there’s just so much darn life to love.”Maybe the ache comes from love, and allowing love to touch you. Maybe it comes from allowing yourself to grieve the love.
Ooooof.
As a kid, I had such a hard time getting older. It wasn’t that my life was hard, but that I had a hard time with life—for whatever reasons, I struggled so intensely with growing up. When I was 10, I cried every night after school: I didn’t want to be in 5th grade, I wasn’t ready for the inevitability of growth, of getting bigger, older, further from my innocence. I remember feeling so uncomfortable in my skin, begging my body to stop growing, please stop, I am not ready, I do not want to.
Fifth grade was when I first became conscious that my body is somehow in collaboration with the external world; when I first experienced glimmers of awareness of what it meant to be alive. Ten was the year of my childhood I noticed I was taller than all of the boys, that I began drooping my shoulders as I walked, that I felt the weight of existing outside the lines of apparently supposed to be, and started wishing on dandelions and fallen eyelashes, I wish I were smaller.
I remember, sometime during that year of Ten, my mom reading me this Billy Collins poem while I cried facedown on the couch. It’s about a child’s heartbreak over growing up. This poem was medicine for my little self, and still makes me cry—it still is so profoundly, stunningly true.
On Turning Ten — Billy Collins
“The whole idea of it makes me feel like I'm coming down with something, something worse than any stomach ache or the headaches I get from reading in bad light-- a kind of measles of the spirit, a mumps of the psyche, a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul. You tell me it is too early to be looking back, but that is because you have forgotten the perfect simplicity of being one and the beautiful complexity introduced by two. But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit. At four I was an Arabian wizard. I could make myself invisible by drinking a glass of milk a certain way. At seven I was a soldier, at nine a prince. But now I am mostly at the window watching the late afternoon light. Back then it never fell so solemnly against the side of my tree house, and my bicycle never leaned against the garage as it does today, all the dark blue speed drained out of it. This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself, as I walk through the universe in my sneakers. It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends, time to turn the first big number. It seems only yesterday I used to believe there was nothing under my skin but light. If you cut me I could shine. But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life, I skin my knees. I bleed.”
Sometimes life does feel like all of you is bleeding, or like you’re crying from a kind of sadness that lives in your bones. I felt that kind of calcified sadness at various points of this past year. Maybe it was leftover pain from all those years ago. Or, maybe there are just always things to ache about.
I’ve come a long way in a year, in ways I mostly didn’t plan for. I moved across the country, then across the state, then found a new job and an apartment and some friends, and I continue to feel pangs of nostalgia and waves of grief over what I keep leaving behind. Sometimes it seems a cruel trick of life, to have to let go of what once felt so right, and other times it just seems a blessing, to have felt that way at all.
I feel softer, now, and less afraid of feeling pain. I trust myself, more. Where I am today does feel right, even with the ache. I’m learning to love the passing of each year: getting older brings growth, and wisdom, and experiences that let you know life is worth feeling.
The ache I feel is for what is gone, and for what is to come, and for the gaps that yawn in between. The ache I feel comes from being willing to let my knees bleed, and my heart break, and I will not close my eyes to any of it.
The ocean helps the ache, I learn today, with its capacity to soften the sharpest edges. The ocean can hold and release you all in the same moment—maybe that’s how we treat the ache. We can breathe with it, like the ocean breathes with us.
When the ache arrives, hold it. Let it stay. It is not supposed to go away entirely—there is too much to love and to grieve.
May we be open to feeling the ache, all the way.
Maggie
Colors: one person on the diving board with their back turned and yells out colors; everyone else chooses a color and when their color is called out, tries to swim silently across the pool without being caught. The most fun.
Happy birthday!
Happy Birthday, my sweet daughter. Loved reading this💜