A Spectrum of Being - Reflections on Birthday Week

It is my birthday week, and this year, I dare say I am excited to mark another year. Yet, the current goings-on are not exactly smooth sailing. Recently, we have suffered a few losses—friends, friends' parents, and family. It struck me just how much our lives are conditioned from a young age to try and separate happiness and grief, as though these two experiences only course through us separately, in a vacuum from each other.

Like many latchkey kids, I was weaned on TV, mostly cartoons, and I remember the limited, inevitable themes the storylines would reiterate: good and evil, with absolutely nothing in between. It conditioned me to make quick, swift judgments of characters who had to neatly fit into one of two options.

But being just a few days away from my born day, at a time when my nearest and dearest are dealing with profound loss, I am reminded of how life actually works. It throws us whatever it will, and it is up to us to make sense of it. From one day to the next, we find ourselves realizing that happiness and pain, suffering and joy, and everything in between, are simply two sides of the same coin—at best, a whole spectrum of being.

In my attempts to decondition from this mentality, I have learned in recent years to find ways to cultivate spaciousness, knowing that change and the unknown are the only constants. This expanse has been necessary for me to let life do what it does best: remain impermanent and evolving from moment to moment. 

Acknowledging this with calm acceptance has been a huge breakthrough for me, something the teachings of mindfulness meditation have oriented me toward in a deeply experiential way.

So, I sit here with a whole range of contradictions, and all of them are my truth. I am so happy and proud to have survived thus far. I am proud of the womxn I have become. When I look at my reflection, I take a moment to let all the sentiments pour in—the critic, the sad, the happy, the guilty, the joyous. All of them are mine, and yet, they are not the same as being me. I cannot tell you how much the idea that I am not defined by narrow thoughts and feelings has bolstered me… manifesting this agency has been so life-changing and transformative for me.

When I look back at a past studio photo of my 18-year-old self, I feel like whispering in her ear, 'You are about to discover how strong you are. We made it.' I see her naiveté as she looks at the camera with hopeful, trusting eyes, before all the painful and heavy things that happened bruised and wounded her irreversibly. Yet, perhaps it was going through that hurt and surviving it that fired up her charisma to be and do the things she did to make a more just difference in this world. She needed to survive, to tend to the lifelong healing of festering pain, and to seek different paths for the people who face pain and suffering around her, so they do not feel stuck and swallowed whole by it, but rather find paths of restoration and healing.

I come into this new age with a bounty of gratitude and grace for all the lessons life has thrown my way. I know that each goes a long way in helping me understand more deeply who I am, what I want, and what I need in this present moment.

Dis-ease has taught me to invest in my relationship with my body, finding the spaciousness to see it as an ally and consort that gets to take all the pleasures and punches in this embodiment.

My heart and my emotions, while mostly hidden in my inner world, define how I experience myself, my relationships, and the lasting feeling of aliveness, survival, and thriving.

And then there is my soul. She has always been a shining light in my interiority, seeking to be freed from whatever shackles the heart and body use to try and restrain her in their attempt (rightly or wrongly) to protect me. My soul remains wild, a nagging light or voice that may sometimes be dimmed or muted but is somehow always there. It reminds me, both in my dreamscapes and my waking life, that I am free, wild, and part of an interpretation beyond time, space, geography, and ancestry.

My soul is the one that enables me to time travel and find myself in different phases of life. She allows me to believe in a sense of wonder, to remain miracle-minded, and to stay in reverence to life and its unpredictable nature. She is the one that guides me even at my lowest, in my deepest burnout, and through my moments of despair. She allows me to be, to see, and to feel whatever may be present, even when it is overwhelming. Somehow, I can soar and fly high and wide in the sky and still feel held, protected, rooted, moored, and anchored.

And so, as I mark the last few years of my forties, I celebrate all the versions of me that did what they needed to do to survive up until here. I say thank you. I am grateful and proud of who I am, warts and all. 

I am profoundly grateful for the ways in which life conspired to have me here—slightly slower, unable nowadays to read clearly without my specs, enduring and enjoying peri-menopause, unapologetic, embracing the growing greys on my scalp—wealthy in life experience and rich with a few, but incredibly valuable, loved ones around me who love, accept, and appreciate me for simply being me.