Yearly Self-Report

Self Reflection in a Million Mirrors: Happy Birthday!

Your yearly birthday ritual of picking every aspect of your life apart has arrived again.

What have you done with your life? How many good years to go? How long until death? Should I have made any of those relationships work? What’s a relationship? These are some of the questions that go through your head every birthday since you’ve been an adult.

Why do we do this to ourselves? Because the calendar dictates it. Once every 365 days we have a reckoning with our existence. Leap years postpone our date with internal anguish for just one extra day. It’s the shaky turbulence we can’t avoid. For those who may consider themselves over-thinkers, or even merely aware, birthdays don’t seem to be joyous occasions anymore. They’re a day to pick apart everything we’ve done, and look ahead at the looming mortality on the horizon.

For the self-critical, it’s a lose-lose situation every year. You have accomplished enough, and you don’t have enough time to accomplish the things you need. At least this is your pressurized version of time that you force upon yourself, condensed in one day, which is always on the day of your birth.

How can you avoid this?

1. Sleeping in. The longer you sleep, the more of the day that will pass by.

2. Make no plans.

3. Keep busy. Do busy-work.

4. Pretend it’s just a normal day. Any other day.

5. Don’t think during the day of your birth.

These may all seem like reasonable ideas, but this approach may not work. You may dread the approach of the day, then the actual birthday itself.

Once the birthday arrives, wake up. Watch tv. Or if you want to go to work, go to work. Doing what you already know how to do eases the pressure to manufacture other activities.

You can make no plans, but if you meet out with family & friends for lunch or dinner, you’ll see you actually enjoy being around these humans that you know, instead of hiding in a closet.

You can try to pretend it’s not the day of your birth, but you’ve probably told someone when you were born hundreds of time in the past year. The customer service rep, a date, a counter person at the liquor store, another customer service rep. You’ve said the day so many times, that when you say this current day’s date out loud, you know this is the day. It’s your birthday.

You can feel the thoughts creep in. Your accomplishments, or lack thereof. Your death. The last time you changed your passwords. Everything. You can’t avoid thinking, but you can take the pressure off yourself. You can say it’s ok you haven’t accomplished everything. And tell yourself you still have time.

So if your parents want to have a birthday dinner for you, enjoy it. If your friends want to meet at the bar, go. And if a significant other wants to give you some lovin’, go with the flow.

Enjoy the day. Overthink on the other 364 days to compensate and make room for a great birthday!