Battle-born and Free

Happy Birthday to Me.

Today is my birthday. Well, today is actually the day before my birthday, but when this hits your inbox I’ll be waking up to a new age. As I begin another trip around the big fireball in the sky, enter the last year of my thirties, and hurl towards my forties-I am reflecting. Not just on the past year but on the past decade, the winding road of my thirties. The steep inclines that threatened to burn out my engine, the jagged cliffs that lined the way and almost caught me, the downhill slippery slopes that nearly took me out, and, of course, the mountain-top clearing that I can finally make out just above the tree tops-something like a fever dream.

I’m reminded of my thirtieth birthday that I spent in Mexico with a man who did not love me, yet swore that he did, and what a shame it was to be so young and beautiful and completely stupid. I’m reminded of my thirty-fifth birthday, the first one I’d spent sober since high school, and the simultaneous freedom and loneliness that finds a woman in early sobriety. I’m reminded of my mother, who, at my age, was on her second marriage and third daughter and my thirty-seventh birthday, the first without her. The last nine years have felt as much like a lifetime as a flash in space, drunk to sober, tethered to motherless, partnered to single to partnered to single again. Full circles and endless loops, it’s been a hell of a ride.

What is in an age anyhow? More so, what does it honestly reveal about a person? Age can only convey the number of trips around the sun, not their substance. I’ve met people half my age who’ve survived deeper hells than I, people twice my age who still don’t know how to have adult conversations. Age can conjure opinions, commentary on the ways my body shows it, the ways it does not. The number could give you a timeline but the number could never tell the story.

When I look back at the girl I was in 2015 it’s easy to see her potential, the bones were there, but she was using the wrong ones. She opted for the beauty bone when she should have chosen the brain bone, the brain bone when she should have allowed the beauty to shine through. She swung with her pain bone when she could have just let her truth bone speak. She swore with her devotion bone when her discernment bone tried to tell her. She flew on her wish bone when the year called for her work bone. She was playing a game of Operation and that damn beeper kept beeping. “Patience is a virtue,” her mother would say and it pissed her off.

At thirty-four I felt like all of my best days were behind me, I was at the end of some proverbial rope, dangling and depleted. The idea that my next decade, my forties, could somehow be the beginning was not a thought remotely entertained. Yet, at thirty-nine, I’m sure of it.

As I look ahead I see a life of possibility. I can’t help but laugh like a madwoman as I write this. The audacity of the world to tell a woman her life and all of its relevance ends at thirty-five! I’m embarrassed at all the ways I bought into this in my youth. They pitched me on preventative skincare and 2.5 kids as the only way to win and I bit. Perhaps, they are hoping we won’t make it to this second wind, that we won’t discover how to tap into the power that awaits us as we wave goodbye to girlhood and forego the minivan. Sobriety was an awakening. Not just about the way I drank, but about the way I ate. I no longer accept what’s being served up to me without asking questions, I don’t gnaw on the bones of societal constructs and I certainly don’t swallow the pits of recommended shelf lives. I can see so clearly now that the key to success is refusing to let anyone project their own accepted limitations onto my life. I am a woman alive. I want to speak, loudly, about all the things they say I shouldn’t and I want to love my body with reckless abandon, center stage, when they’d rather I start hiding it behind the curtain.

I fear that all negative forces, entities meant to stop me from stepping fully into my God-given purpose, have missed their window for victory. I am a woman who knows her best days are ahead. I’ve called back all the bones and put them in their rightful places. I’ve traded fear of failure for unabashed belief in myself, a woman returned. The shame that tried to kill my shine has been alchemized into fuel for the midnight fire. I write poems as prayers under the full moon and I watch them come to life. Deep water is where I bathe, naked and proud. I am a woman awake, unfazed by the number of her years, unbothered by the lines on her sun-kissed face, no longer undone by the violence of her past. Battle-born and free. Happy Birthday to me.