Volume 2, Entry 9: Your Day
You wake up and don’t immediately remember it is your birthday. It’s just another day that you’ll slowly fade into remembering is Thursday, another day with work to be done including writing that second final and—
Then it hits you that today is your birthday and your shoulders sag before you even have your glasses on.
Already you feel guilty for feeling this way, for dreading what will follow. Your mind reminds you that you could call in sick and just never log on, but that just prompts more questions and more attention and that’s precisely what you don’t want. You want to be invisible on this day, invisible from so many of the people who want to make you happy. You want to disappear.
This isn’t the first time you’ve wanted to disappear on your birthday. You planned to run away senior year and drive north. You figured you would end up in Seattle a day or two later and crumple into Kim and Randy and just stay there, a different place where nobody else knew you, because the weight of feeling invisible and purposeless not by choice was finally too much. This was the first time you ever put words to this feeling, the first time you let the curtain pull back and your could see how little the work and job and baseball and future meant to you.
You thought you had reasons and justifications for this feeling, that it was a logical consequence, a product of circumstances, that made you want to flee. You were wrong, of course, but you didn’t know that yet. Instead you woke up earlier than normal, knowing the tank of your Contour was already full and hearing the silence of the house confirm that you could leave. You weren’t packed, you hadn’t printed a map; you hadn’t planned anything, not a single thing, so when you woke up early to run away, you had to face these truths while deciding whether to go or to stay.
But none of that stopped you from leaving.
You stayed because, even as your tired and scared mind weighed the paralyzing uncertainty of leaving versus the paralyzing certainty of remaining, you realized that they were both the same. Nothing would change because it was you that was wrong, not your location or circumstances. So you stayed in bed, drenched in reflective defeat, as the clocked ticked forward and you officially turned eighteen.
After picking up Joey and driving to school, you started the day uneventfully. Tú recibiste un “Feliz cumpleaños, Miguel” de la Sra. Mora so a few people caught on, but you were barely present in class, the stench of defeat overwhelming your nostrils like sour milk. You went to AP Physics next and sat silently, skimming through your notes without processing anything, just you and the teacher at his desk. You weren’t even aware that the room was empty to question it, even as the bell rang.
And what happened next, the cake and singing and gifts and overwhelming gesture and feeling of being seen—it blocked all those feelings of defeat and invisibility out.
It didn’t matter that most of those people didn’t really know you or that those people would nearly all fade from your life as quickly as you faded from theirs. It didn’t matter that sizes were off or that you ate lunch alone afterward, spending the majority in Ms. Wilde’s room talking about the gesture with her rather than any of your peers. Even now, seventeen years later—nearly the same distance from that moment as it once was from your literal birth—it still conjures powerful, positive emotion to think about it.
That you have so many times shared that story as a sort of reaffirming parable and resolution, despite the fact that it didn’t fix you or make you stop wanting to disappear, doesn’t even produce the guilt it normally does.
[[ This is a good thing. ]]
But today you want to disappear again on your birthday. You don’t want to run away—just disappear, just slip out of existence for 24 hours and have everyone not even realize you are gone. To not have to plaster on a smile and pretend your are happy to protect them from worrying about you. To not have to pit your new relationship with food against your desire to show people you care about them and appreciate that they care about you. To not have to consider what it means to be 35 and, in the eyes of so many others, alone and be forced into dwelling on your decision more and second-guessing yourself more after a lifetime of hard-earned self-awareness. To not have any reaction compelled by social niceties or stress over the intensity of your reaction to a heartfelt gift or letter. If you can’t spend the day with the people you love—and you can’t—you’d rather just be invisible and disappear.
It’s the same wish you made in 2004 but for the opposite reasons.
And you feel drenched by guilt and shame for feeling this way. Unlike eighteen when finding out people cared about you was a surprise, you know they do now; a lot of people do. This fact makes your desire to disappear—that you understand now as a dissonant symptom of something, not just a loose body feeling—even more painful to feel. You don’t want to hurt people, especially not the people who care enough to shower you with messages and gifts; you just don’t want to disappoint them by reacting wrong or saying the wrong thing or, because so many of them actually know you, have them see the pain in your eyes that you can hide on Zoom but not from them. You just want this day to be over, this one specifically, so that you can have less to think about for once. You hoped you could wake up and, with all social media deactivated or deleted, hide from feeling anything and write about the impossible calculus of teaching Calculus this year and just not even remember what today is but you failed nine seconds after waking up and walked right into these feelings and memories and shames and the truth and that’s the real rub of your birthday: it happens whether you like it or not. You have zero control. Time keeps moving forward and you keep accumulating years and keep drifting further and further from the birthdays that defined you and closer and closer to the end but all without changing those fundamental defining traits that make you and break you in equal parts and you never forget those things or escape them but on your birthday you have to face them and account for them because a birthday is nothing but an accounting exercise in otherwise arbitrary endpoints and opting out would have been your preference if there were just a waiver that you could sign but, now as in 2004 and here as in your delusionally-theoretical Seattle, you don’t get to opt out of who you are or how you are built. And that’s ultimately fine because every birthday doesn’t always feel this way and you won’t have to think about it the same way after today.
Your birthday will mercifully end in eighteen hours. You won’t need to hide from it anymore. You won’t need to feel bad for wanting to hide from it. You won’t need deep breaths to process the confusion of what you are feeling and the life you are living because people won’t be commenting on it. It will be March 5th and then March 6th will come and then soon there will be sufficient distance from it so that you can negotiate against the urge to disappear without the candles.
What would you wish for if you had candles to blow out?
You’d wish that it wasn’t your birthday.
[[ You will get your wish. ]]
Content Consumption
FILM
Nomadland (2020)
A melancholy film filled with beautiful scenic views and a gorgeous instrumental score, Nomadland was moving and meditative in a stirring way that left me feeling reflective as the filmmakers mostly stayed out of the way and let Frances McDormamd’s wistful gaze and the world her character inhabited tell the story. // Fern (McDormand) has lost her job of multiple decades in Nevada and elects to live in her van, traveling about between odd jobs and campsites as part of a large community of nomadic house-less people. Sometimes she works in quarries or restaurants, other times she clocks in at an Amazon distribution center—but always she returns to that van and lives a spartan, bartering existence. There are friendships of note (with a cast of mostly real nomadic people who fill most roles) and a relationship of sorts with Dave (David Straithern) who hopes for more but mostly the film simply follows Fern as she feels the world, makes small connections, and works to stay ahead of financial crisis and an ominous knock on her window telling her to park elsewhere. // The criticism of Nomadland is predictable: the action is limited here, with little more given than moist eyes to convey what Fern is thinking, but I appreciated how little hand-holding there was here. The viewer is tight to Fern through every scene, watching her forge bonds, work contentedly, and grapple with huge decisions about her uncertain future and, although some answers do eventually congeal, I felt close to Fern and desperately rooted for her to find a peace of sorts. The world she explores and the people she meets are wonderful, but she isn’t seeking community or vistas or even a place to stay; she’s contemplating an escape of sorts and a freedom that wasn’t possible in her old company tract. I would not make the same choices as Fern, but that didn’t detract from the story for me; this was a bit like The Florida Project where the world was impossibly different than mine but I had no trouble falling into its rhythms and heartaches. And that immersive and contemplative atmosphere really seemed contagious, often pushing me deep into thought and forcing me to regroups myself in the film after falling down an intellectual or emotional rabbit hole. // For certain, Nomadland won’t be for every audience; this is a different story with conflicts that look like mere ripples across the screen. But I found a deep, internal conflict at the center of this film that questions the path forward that we all follow. I have no desire to live Fern’s lifestyle, but exploring it for 107 minutes rewarded me. Kudos to director Chloe Zhao for guiding this film with care and dignity for the communities it observed and more kudos to McDormand for never doing too much. Sometimes the perfect template for grand questions offer no visible question marks.
There’s a part of me that worries about sharing this piece, knowing that it can be read as bleak (even if I don’t truly see it that way). A part of me thought hard enough about never releasing it that I mentioned that very idea to Alyiah on our walk. But we both agreed: this is the truth. What purpose is there to this whole exercise than to share what I’m authentically feeling and thinking with people I trust who actually know me? That’s probably the best gift I could get out of a birthday: knowing that I can be honest about the complicated feeling each one brings with people.