The 39th Birthday*
Processing Mental Health, Grief, Healing, and whether or not pandemic birthdays count (jk, they do)
I turned 40 during Covid.
Born on Memorial Day of 1980, my 40th birthday was three months shy of my Dad's passing combined with the still ongoing global pandemic in 2020. Add in the transition from in-person work to remote and the great many experiences floating about that required many adjustments and it’s been quite the new decade of life.
At times, it feels like the past couple of years haven’t taken place and I jokingly wonder: do these years even count?
I have often heard the jokes about the Jack Benny birthday since turning 39, where you’re 39 for the rest of your life. I vividly recall a print out celebrating my Dad’s “Seventh 39th” as a child, a snapshot into a window of earlier life.
Jack Benny is admittedly (a bit) before my time, but I was so new to the grief of such a challenging loss and so much change, that while I was grateful for the experience of another year, it was so sad for me to turn 40, and 41, was particularly hard as well.
I loved to talk stories with my Dad and I miss the opportunity to not ask any sage advice on turning 40 or being in my 40s from him. Your 40s are supposed to be the period where you really start to live and it would have been cool, to have my consciousness that I have now, and share in that conversation with him.
One of the highlights of my forties is that I got engaged. On January 6, 2021, but that will be another column…
I proposed in surprise fashion to the love of my life and she said yes, after a funny pause to turn off the oven because we were making enchiladas. I’d turn 41 a few months later and she took me to a restaurant in a hotel that was built over the site where the hospital that I was born in, once lived. As we lived, I thought again how, wow, 41, grief is strange, and what a world we live because here in the Hawaiian Islands where I have lived my whole life, our lockdown, was pretty tight. We have made the most of it in our bubble, but what a strange times indeed.
With all the fluctuations we have seen with the different waves of Covid, I find myself alternating at times between an even greater joy and gratitude with a healthy dose that can only be described as numbness. I realized that I was cycling into a depressed state and sought out therapy.
I’m a big believer in therapy and have had the good fortune of experiencing both excellent guidance and terrible guidance. Fortunately for me, my experiences have gotten better and better with time and I found a great therapist who has really helped me to talk through and release 40+ years of ‘stuff’ as my teacher would call it.
Every profound experience and season of loss in life has taught me so much and at 39, I remember writing in my journal:
“I’m at ease with my unease.”
And the part that should be scary, I think at least it should, but was the other truth that came with that statement:
“Until I am not.”
It’s natural in life to feel discomfort. Feelings that can be considered ‘meh’ quite often help us to grow and can be transformative.
I always knew that losing a parent would be very difficult and I have no idea what that will be like when my it’s my Mom’s time to go to the next adventure in Spirit. It’s nothing I’m in a rush to experience but at 39* (okay, 42), the reality that we’re all on the clock is even more present.
Part of being present during the pandemic came because of the hard pause in life as we knew it. The shift from took me away from access to tools I’d come to use over the years to help me grapple with stress like and less social interaction. This has opened up a whole room in my consciousness where it seems all the traumas had been archived, for me to review, assess, and hopefully heal.
It was in that room within where I realized I was not so at ease with the unease and I didn’t want it to get any worse.
I had been meaning to get a therapist since my last therapist retired a few years back but he was phenomenal, and a tough act to follow.
But, as my new therapist has shared with me, “The same thing can never happen to you twice.”
Often we replay a bad experience and hold onto it. But in order to thrive and flow forward, we have to recognize whatever it is, good, not-so, otherwise, and leave it in the past. While it can teach and help us, we need not replay and perpetuate the trauma, which we have become so good at.
Over the years, I’ve also heard that the lesson repeats until we get it and I have come to think of this in regard to my feelings, in particular, seasons where stress and change run rampant. My most recent experience of such a season led me to cycle into depression.
The reality that has helped me as I’ve worked through it all is that whether or not I needed to spend the beginning of this decade in lockdown, I did. I had to go through the inevitable of losing a parent at some point, just now. Lastly, I needed the alteration to the flow of my life in order to heal, and make changes. These were all things that I could not resist, the struggle of which would have surely been too much and suffocated me.
My sharing of all of this is also part of my healing process. I’ve been a writer since small kid time and on this most recent birthday I got “old man flowers” as a gift, so I’ll keep writing through old man time.
Writing and sharing, it’s a form of remembering, it’s a ritual to honor the energy and release it.
After Dad passed, I found an old message he left in 2017, wishing me a Happy Birthday. He would sing “All the monkeys in the zoo…” with a smile that I can still see. I wanted to listen to that message in 2020 and 2021, and I couldn’t. But on my birthday this year, I pressed play and I marveled with tears in my eyes at hearing his voice.
I need to let go of the asterisk. Or maybe I hold on to it because as much as the last few years has stripped away, for all of us, all of us have collectively experience great loss, this epoch has given us so much.
My hope is that we grow. As mental health awareness month winds down, I encourage anyone who feels they need help, go for it, every day, not just a month. Don’t look back, take the leap because you deserve healing, love, and Light in your life.
We don’t have a perfect life.
We never will.
But we have soul much beauty and love if we seek it. As it was written so long ago, Seek and ye shall find.
With that, a hui hou (until we meet again) my friends.