Celebrations and reflections

Personal and collective

It was my birthday a few days ago. I went to a SPA hotel for a couple of days to be lazy and soak in the thermal springs Romans used to bathe in. So, it’s no surprise that proximity to antiquity made me think of time and change. (Pictures at the end).

It was just yesterday that I said I’d be dead by 50, mainly because that was 35 years in the future, and all the 50-year-old women I knew were round, wobbly, and wore long, dark skirts and buttoned-up cardigans. Gossiping with the neighbors and chastising the youth didn’t seem like much of a life from that 15-year-old’s perspective.

Next thing I knew, I was living in Hawaii – the first unimaginable for a Bulgarian teenager. Then more stuff happened. Most of them are unimaginable. And here I am, happily still not dead and still living through unimaginables.

I’ve been thinking lately about how most of my life so far just happened despite my careful organizing and planning. But at the same time, if I hadn’t organized and planned as well as I did, most of what I’ve done and still do would not be possible. Yet, a lot of what affects me personally is entirely out of my control and somehow becomes my responsibility to navigate. Whoever came up with this living thing had a sense of humor.

I was never the person who knew from the age of 5 that I would grow up to be something specific, such as a doctor or an attorney. It feels like big swaths of time were spent surviving and meeting good people who pointed me in the right direction at the right time.

So, I don’t really want to take full credit for living the kind of life and accomplishing the kinds of things many young people today will never have the opportunity to experience. Times have changed. What was possible in the 1990s is now out of reach for many. Also, back then, we didn’t worry about getting kidnapped in bright daylight by the American government or shot at school, at church, or at Walmart.

On the occasion of my birthday, I am reflecting on a few things. Some personal, and others also personal via the collective.

1) Time flies. My grandmother told me that, but when she did, for me, a year took forever and a day. And now, I have more time behind me than I have ahead of me, and the difference is getting bigger every day. It makes me either not want to get out of bed or hurry up and do more stuff. Usually, both at the same time. It gets tricky some days.

2) Just because I still fit in my clothes from when I was 18, it doesn’t mean I wear them the same. Things have moved around, mostly to places I would rather not see them. And to keep things from getting worse requires diligent effort, resources, and a time commitment. I don’t remember putting any effort back then. If anything, I ate like I was pregnant with triplets and looked like I’d been starved to death by my evil parents. Now, I check the scale every morning and write the number down. I keep track of steps, calories, protein, fiber, and a small chemistry lab of supplements, biohacking myself out of being a foodie. I used to like being a foodie. Now, I suppose I prefer not to get fat, sick, and tired more.

3) I will never have a good relationship with my mother. Having an amicable one is a real accomplishment, and that’s more than fine with me. To have a good one would require my mother to step out of her victim mentality and codependency, or me to step into the drama of maintaining her victim status and codependency. Neither is going to happen. This is as far as we can go.

To illustrate the point: