Another Year Older

So I realized this morning that April is quickly on it's way out the door for another year, which means May is fast approaching, and with it...my birthday.

I honestly don't know when I stopped really enjoying the idea of turning a year older, but as my 37th approaches, I realize that it's probably been about ten years at least since I really felt like "celebrating" my coming into this world.

Contrary to popular belief, it's not the result of the stereotypical "Midlife Crisis" or fear of getting old either. I understood a long time ago that there's no way to stop the progression of life we all go through, and I made up my mind that I was not going to be like people I knew who had to be dragged kicking and screaming into accepting they're not 21 anymore.

*Editorial Note - In fact, I remember waking up on my 30th birthday, rolling out of bed and feeling the same cracks and pops in my bones that I had the day before, so it was far from an Earth-shattering revelation that my 20's were now over.

This is where I was when I turned 36, choosing to run away and get lost for the whole week in a city I'd never seen before rather than stay home and try to find some arbitrary way to commemorate the occasion. But when it came time to actually acknowledge it, I didn't really do all that much other than treat myself to lunch in San Francisco's famous Chinatown (which ended up not being all that great, truth be told) and then going to a sleepy little dive not too far from where I was staying in San Jose called Singlebarrel and having a drink in a comfortable chair in a corner of the very dark space, drowning out the surrounding chatter and conversation with my iPod and scribbling down everything I was running from in my notebook.

Had I a job and the means to do so now, I probably would do the same thing and run away to somewhere else I haven't been to before, of which there are a great many places. Before I left last year, I posted a rather morose note to my friends telling them that I was, in a sense, doing them a favor by taking off and not having to go through the arbitrary paces of wishing me a "Happy Birthday," and for a while now, I've tried convincing them to treat it, (and I've told them this with absolute sincerity) as just another day and to really ignore it.

So why would I do that? Why marginalize, trivialize and disregard the fact that I made it through another year? As I sit here and rack my brain for an honest answer, this is what I've been able to come up with.

My continued existence isn't worth celebrating and even if it was, I honestly, truly, don't remember how.

Now I can already hear the comeback to that, "How could you possibly think such a thing?!" which is a perfectly valid question and also worth answering.

The answer is that looking at my life and what it is now from standing in the middle of it reinforces that opinion a little more everyday. I'm unemployed and frantically looking for a job wherever I can find one with next to no success. I'm single with absolutely no interest in dating or finding a girlfriend because my divorce and everything that came after eradicated my instincts and ability to trust either what I feel or the intentions whoever I might be interested in. I'm an absentee father to a brilliant little boy who is everything that I was at his age and I'm desperate not to corrupt him in the same way I was by my parents and the life of growing up in a broken family.

My days are spent grappling with extreme self-doubt and a total lack of both self-confidence and self-worth and even on the one when I go to sleep feeling good about myself, there's those inevitable swings back the other way and I consider my entire life to this point to have been completely and utterly wasted.

Now if I had a surging career, a nice house, less stress and all the things I've wanted, I'm sure I wouldn't feel this way. Those weren't the cards I was dealt so I'm trying to make good with what I have.

From my view, which is all I have to really go on here, there's only one legitimately positive reason why I should celebrate my birthday this or any other year.

Because despite all that shit and everything I've had to fight off, everything I want so badly to forget, and everything I want more than anything in the world to change...I'm still here.

Try as it all has to put me in the ground, and there have been many, MANY times where it was all but assured, it hasn't.

That has to count for something, I hope.