Birthdays and January Blues

January 22, 2024

January is always a dry spell for me. I feel like my well of creativity has been sucked clean, I am exhausted from the holidays and I am just trying to bump along and make it through the month. It’s always been a hard month for me, but the hardest part of that is that my birthday rests right in the middle of it.

Growing up in Iowa, there was always a snow storm on or around my birthday. Without fail. Every year. One year, it took out the power and left us inside for a couple of days. We all got a little stir crazy and sick of sitting around without much to do. This is also taking into account the few hours of sunlight being stifled by the gray clouds that haunt the sky all winter long, so even when we had sunlight, it was very dim and very little. Plus, none of us really wanted to sit next to the window to get more of it, because it was so wildly cold. Still, this is a fond memory in my mind. I can still recall the way the trees bent under the weight of the ice that was almost an inch thick on their poor branches.

Another year, my senior year of high school to be exact, a friend of mine hosted her birthday party on my birthday and no one had a clue. I tried to attend and feel happy to be celebrating her, but more than anything it was painful to have felt forgotten and only invited because I was going to be living with her the following year. If you couldn’t tell, I thought we were a lot closer than she did.

I was talking to my sister about why we feel like birthdays are hard ( hers is in June so it is not just a January thing ) and she mentioned that she feels like it is because it is another marking of a passage of time, that it is a reminder of all the things that she didn't accomplish that year. It was a reminder of all the things that she set out to do that year that she had yet to accomplish. It was a reminder that there are people who are younger and in similar shoes who have accomplished more. She also mentioned that there is this expectation of joy, like the holidays, and no matter how wonderful the day is, somehow it feels like it comes up short.

This all being said, this birthday was wonderful, Eli made sure that it was filled with fun and relaxing things. I would argue that this is one of my very best birthdays. Second to two years ago when Eli proposed to me while we were ice skating. It was a beautiful, snowy, day and it felt so cozy and exciting!