It’s Not About The Cake. It’s About What You Learned Was Safe To Want.
On learning early that wanting things was risky, a student I can’t stop worrying about, and giving myself permission to want pizza anyway.
The people who make it through weeks like this are the ones who stopped requiring themselves to be fine first.
You’ve probably had a week like this. Not a bad day. A bad week, the kind where more than one hard thing lands at the same time, and you’re expected to keep functioning through all of it like your body isn’t tracking the total.
If this week has been easy for you, this post probably isn’t for you today, and that’s fine. But if some part of you just exhaled a little reading that, keep going.
I’m writing this on my birthday. I already know how that sentence is supposed to sound, soft, grateful, a little glowing. It isn’t. I have never liked my birthday. Not the version where people make it a whole thing, and somehow also not the version where they forget. There is no door in that hallway that leads anywhere good for me, and most years that’s a small, manageable weirdness about me. This is not one of those years, because I actually sat with it this time instead of just being annoyed by it.
The Week That Didn’t Leave Room For A Birthday
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