23 and counting

as i'm writing this, it is the 23rd anniversary of the day i was born. technically i won't be 23 years old until 8:04 p.m. but i can't promise that i'll feel like blogging in that exact moment, and i'll probably be out to dinner with my sister at an indian restaurant the size of a double wide trailer adorned with tacky lights that radiate a most festive milieu. what kind of twenty something writer would i be if i didn't reflect on the past year?

about 2 months ago there was a switch. a cocktail of circumstance mixed with me choosing self priority over misery has yielded some fascinating results. they call it growing up or something. the process can leave you staggering drunk through hallways of your old habits, but eventually lead you to a sobering state of clarity, which is something easier to taste hints of than to swallow. a shot of ourselves may not go down smooth--it burns, it stings, and you may want to chase it while listening to that lil' jon/lmfao 'shots' song. but if we hover around the salt on the rim of a dressed up fruity concoction, we can sip away with fear in a sleeker glass. the more we can disguise the taste of our poison the better it tastes, right? (i'm required to use a drinking metaphor because proper birthday protocol suggests i be wasted in a bar somewhere making mistakes with my life and puking).

and that's just the past two months. the changes of the past year are countless. i guess the more recent ones are shining more significantly because they are more current and have charted personal leaps and bounds even when i'm only taking baby steps. there wasn't any moment of enlightenment. there wasn't a specific spark. the temperature for change was just right i suppose.

a year ago i was freshly graduated which lends itself to a clean slate transition. throw a birthday on top of that and you can't help but glow of that new beginning feeling. this year i'm fighting to maintain that feeling, to keep the slate clean, to awake with fresh eyes that see positive light thru the clouds of negativity that people call 'life.' i hate when people say 'that's life' when something difficult arises. that's not life. that's a part of life. life is the whole damn ride.

i feel truly in the driver's seat. previously i knew i was directing my life, but it was more like i was a back seat driver politely trying not to interfere with the course of my own life. challenges always present themselves, many of them reoccurring, but it won't shake me to the core. i can lose balance but i'm able to recover. the problem with reoccurring issues is you tend to blame yourself for their reappearance as if you attract them. and maybe on some level it is in your nature, but the haunting familiarity of challenges past doesn't mean you are in the wrong. maybe they come back as an opportunity to apply what you learned in round one of this fight. or maybe you didn't learn. or maybe it's a total coincidence. but viewing it as an opportunity is half the battle in itself.

fact: i'm not very excited about my birthday. recent years celebrations suggest that it will in fact suck. my 21st was spent working 16 hrs at a minor league baseball game, which was a great job but an arduous doubleheader. last year, ugliness surfaced and one of my best friend's endured a break up. we still made the best of it, but my enthusiasm has since dwindled. i guess to me it's just another day, but at least i'm viewing every 'another day' as a fresh one.

-k.