Another Year, Unasked
No one checks whether you're ready before the year turns over. It just does. And then it's July, and there's a candle in front of you, and you're a year older whether or not the last one went the way you planned.
July is my birthday month, so I think about this more than most people do this time of year. Sometimes we treat a birthday as if it were a tally of what we’ve built, who was at the table, whether the life we have matches the one we’d sketched out. That math doesn't hold up well when the life changes underneath you.
Birthdays are strange for anyone in the middle of a fresh start. The date doesn't care that you've moved, or split a household, or learned to sign your own name to things you used to sign together. It arrives on schedule. The candle gets lit. Someone, somewhere, asks what you wished for.
If this is your first birthday on the other side of something, you don't owe anyone a performance. You don't have to be radiant about it. You're allowed to find it tender, or boring, or quietly enormous. What I keep relearning is that a birthday isn't a verdict. It's a marker. Proof you got here. That's smaller than a celebration and bigger than nothing, and most years, that's the honest size of it.
Here is what I recommend.
Tear this page out as a reminder for whenever your birthday is
Know that a birthday in the midst of a fresh start might be weird — it might be better, worse, different, scary, lonely, wonderful — it’s a weird one. That’s okay. This is your first (and hopefully last) birthday while you’re navigating divorce. And the first of a whole new reality. That’s going to be different, no matter what you do.
Build a day that looks like a perfect Saturday to you. And do that. It’s my secret hack to birthdays.
So: another year, unasked. Light the candle anyway. Then get on with the day.
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