Some Other Ways In Which My Birthday Sucked Shit
While the day itself saw a long and discursive post about autism, chronic fatigue, sarcoidosis, and death—featuring, among other things, Carl Linnaeus, J. D. Salinger, Heartbreak High, Oregon Zoo, Soul Coughing, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Kurt Vonnegut, Richard Powers, Shoplifters of the World, and The Bear—having been written the night before it says nothing about how the day itself went this year.
My statuslog in the morning:
Another birthday means another day presumptively set aside in advance for existential depression, which I’m going to figure explains the intense and frustrating bout of morning insomnia to help make the day even harder.
My statuslog in the evening:
And then I sent myself spiraling into dysregulation because the deep birthday depression made me hate my blog design and I tried to “fix” it, all while the win of having gotten nearly all my blogging from 2018-present back online by today turned into the lose of having it break the system so now the archive doesn’t even work right, and my birthday really is the shittiest day of the year, every single year, unhelped by my blog post for the day, which ultimately is about seeing and being seen, basically passing almost completely unnoticed.
That last brings to mind a post from five years ago which I almost included this morning’s except that I thought it would a bit too heavy-handed given the Nancy strip it references, all of which nicely illustrates the tension at issue between wanting to be seen on the one hand and the fact that #FrannyWasRight on the other.
It’s beyond my capacity, at the moment, to express how wrenching is the situation with my blog archives, having successfully gotten imported what I strove so hard to finish up before Friday hit. The entire push this past week was all about at least having that win, but it’s difficult not to feel like I should have expected it would be taken away from me almost immediately.
As it says about this situation on my posts page: “this is broken, like seriously broken, and so are the source pages, and it broke on my birthday, the shittiest day of the year every year, when I’m most aware of how unfixable my entire existence is, because of course it did”.
That is, ultimately, the problem with my birthday: it’s always and again just a reminder how unfixable my entire existence is, and how it’s now mostly a question of just how slowly or how quickly things go downhill. There is no realistic path by which it can do anything else.
In the end, I wound the day down through a combination of baked Chex and Shoplifters of the World, which together still were unable to prevent or preclude my marking my State of Mind for the day, when prompted for it before bed by my watch, as Very Unpleasant.
Generally speaking, this should be the low point of my year. While the line between December and January is the other temporal risk factor for me, it’s not usually as soul-suckingly abrasive and corrosive as is the anniversary of my own birth.
Just another 365 days and another 584,000,000 miles until I have to go through it all again, with all the attendant anticipatory angst over just how much worse it will be a year from now, as along the way I live yet another considerable portion of my death.