Happy Birthday To This

You Are My Gift

Janet Hill Studio

I make no plans, hoping someone will organize a surprise party for me; I make no plans and then feel sad when I have no plans; I think about all the ways I haven’t measured up or done The Things I’m supposed to have done by the age it is that I’m turning; I think about all The Things I wanted to change that are precisely the same as they were the year before. Most importantly, I assume the reason anyone I care about who didn’t wish me a happy birthday is that I figured out a way over the past year to make them hate me.

All ridiculous, self-sabotaging behavior, and guess what?

I know it.

At some point, I became bad at my birthday, which, given how I used to feel, is either mystifying or makes perfect sense.

To wit, circa 1979, copyright ME:

One possible explanation for my ever-deteriorating birthday behavior is that I possess a brain still partially frozen at the age of one, turning two: The birthday brain still lives in my parents' pre-war apartment on East 64th Street, the only one we lived all together in. That brain is forever walking down a very long, very bright yellow hall. At the end of the hall is a den: a big grey couch, oversized chairs, a TV against the wall, and an actual pinball machine, which will disappear before the birthday brain is old enough to appreciate it.

Fifty years and four days ago, I crossed the threshold of that room and entered some other dimension. Streamers dripping off the walls. Pale pinks and powder blues. White doilies and those doohickeys you blow, the kind that makes wrapped-up ribbon jerkingly unfurl from your mouth, one set at each place on a never-seen-before stretched-out table. Pointy polka-dotted paper hats. Pleated tissue paper cups filled with my number one favorite candy pre-government mandated removal of the reds: i.e., M&M's.

Laid before me is pure joy. The room is magic, and I discover this newly made mecca before anyone else gets there. Before it fills with other kids. Before even my mom or my dad will arrive. Later, after the cake and ice cream, a charge of us will be led back down the yellow hall, tiny hopped-up sugar freaks, kazoos bleating, banging actual pots and pans with wooden spoons, following a guru who looks like Snow White if Snow White were in her late forties and who is, in fact, my grandma.

My actual grandma. Incredible.

Birthday brain records the first thing primarily, though: how, in a single blink, the predictable room at the end of a long yellow hall became heaven.

Hope rose like a hot flower from the bottom of my belly up into my chest whenever I walked the hall’s length after that, passing the entrance to the kitchen on the left and my bedroom to the right. Any time I walked toward the den, the expectation lived, visceral and undaunted, that there would be sudden magic built just for me, waiting at the end.

Of course, there wasn’t; there couldn’t be. Not like that.

Not again.

Dad and Me/Foundational Party

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I say it, sometimes silently, sometimes out loud:

Brain being brain.

I learned this a couple of years ago from one of my favorite mindfulness teachers, Tara Brach, whom I love because she is an extremely laid-back guru. I say it when the thoughts that interrupt any hopefulness or momentum come—on my birthday or any day, really. At this stage of the game, I must employ the teachings of multiple gurus, but I try to pare them down to only the most useful.

You have to be willing to write shit. Every day, Write shit.

This is what another guru in the form of an accomplished old writer/director friend of my parents told me many years ago when I came to him creatively blocked and, not coincidentally, extremely depressed.

He didn’t mean shit as a synonym for stuff; he meant you’re a writer. So you have to write something every day, fully willing for it to be shitty. I know this is excellent advice and necessary wisdom, particularly for a born perfectionist like myself. And yet, as with so much else, I regularly fail at implementing it. Why am I telling you all this?

Because there’s a difference between my birthday this year and so many of the previous ones, and the difference is named

You.

YOU are why there are ten new essays I’m relatively proud of here, plus an exhaustively researched interview with a #veryfamous man who mocked me for utilizing this platform and then immediately followed suit, authoring his own excellent and extremely prolific substack, which has swiftly amassed thousands more subscribers than this one.

NOT THAT IT’S A COMPETITION!

The point is, if you know me personally at all, you know that my writing, even semi-regularly, and sending that writing out into the world is…significant.

I don’t have enough paid subscribers for a fucking checkmark I don’t have enough paid subscribers to come close to sustaining this I don’t have enough subscribers, paid or otherwise, to justify the amount of time and energy I spend on each piece

ETCETERA.

When that drum starts to beat, I say brain being brain and remind myself it doesn’t matter. That any of you are reading what I’m writing means not only am I writing, but I’m publishing at least some of it, which means I am forcing myself to overcome deep insecurities about whether I have any right or reason to tell you what I think and care about.

To friends, family, and strangers alike, I’ve said some version of:

Here’s a thing I wrote. It matters to me. You might find it valuable. Please read it.

Central Park Circa 1974 by Rusty Guinzburg (I think)

I’ve done this repeatedly, and you can trust and believe every single time it’s made me want to burrow deep into the Earth’s core.

Because, on some fundamental level, I don’t feel safe taking up space or asking for your attention. On some fundamental level, I don’t feel I deserve your money or your time. I know these fears and anxieties, these deep-rooted barriers to ‘success,’ are not remotely unique to me, and that’s why I place them in front of your eyeballs.

Instead of…not?

Instead of maintaining the ruse that I am a very cool and confident mistress of the creative arts.

Circa 1981/My Evita

My non-uniqueness is why I mention anything here at all. After this number of birthdays, I know that what we all want is to feel less adrift in the bleak sea of our own anxiety, less drawn down to the watery depths by those ghostly predators, synaptic sharks, circling our subconscious. Their first job was to save us, and they did, but now we think their hunger makes us impossible to love.

Brain being brain.

So, I keep going. I keep trying to write shit, even though I am constantly thinking about when and how to stop. An earlier draft of this first-anniversary post thanked you for coming, but in the interest of saving us both any more obligation or frustration, I informed you it was time to go our separate ways.

And then, for better or worse, it clocked me upside the noggin that at least a few of you beautiful people signed up between when I began this project a year ago and now. You paid money in advance for a year-long subscription to my writing and photography—not for no reason but because I, my very own self, asked you to! Or, I don’t know, someone else recommended it to you!

Whatever!

The point is I owe you your entire year’s worth, which means I can’t, in good conscience, officially and permanently sign off here until I figure out when it’s been twelve months since the last advanced paying person subscribed. And this means if at least one new person signs up every month, I maybe can’t stop at all.

Hooray! Also, UGH.

(A perfect epitaph.)

Savannah, Georgia. 2024. ©Me

Anyway, instead of saying goodbye, I want to say thank you. Thank you for taking the time to read what I write; time out of what I know are busy, complicated, and often overwhelming lives, time in what I realize is a highly saturated Subscriptionverse — to leave a kind comment or to share the pieces that meant something to you with whoever you’ve been willing to.

THANK YOU.

You are the gift. I mean it.

And to those who’ve offered support by actually laying down their credit card, please know how particularly grateful to you I am. For obvious reasons, but subtler ones, too, you’re making a difference in how I conduct my life.

Thank You/I Love You/You Know Who You Are

The thing about predictable rooms, the ones you wish were heaven, is that you’ll have to switch out the furniture yourself at a certain point. You’ll have to sneak in before anyone’s the wiser, before the old voices get too loud, and it all appears impossibly outdated, not worth the energy required to reimagine. To transform.

Advice to any and all Birthday Brains among us:

Borrow a bigger table and set it up for some mystery, some type of magic. Surround yourself with the ones still singing for you after all these years.

Make a wish and keep it safe. Raise your voice and eat some cake.

I mean, who knows

Maybe you’ll surprise yourself.

Caught in the light by a beloved friend last June.