I have more to say about my birthday–on my birthday. Technically. It’ll be my actual birthday in roughly seven hours I’ll be…ah….fifty…..er……..five? Yeah, that’s right. I honestly had to think about it for several seconds because I don’t really think about it. Again, it’s not because I’m getting older–it’s just because my age doesn’t matter to me.
Fun fact: When I was younger, I used to say I was a year older on January 1st. No idea why I did that, but many East Asian countries start at age 1 or 2 at birth. Maybe it was osmosis. Anyway, I say I have no idea why I started doing it, but it helped me get use to my new age by the time my actual birthday rolled around. As a result, though, I don’t always know how old I am. And, more to the point, I don’t really care. As with everything else in my life, it’s just a detail that doesn’t matter. Age really is just a number, and what I can or can do isn’t defined by it.
Whatever. I find my birthday meaningless, but I’m ok with other people wanted to acknowledge it (to a certain extent). Like, I’m going to be talking to K tomorrow, just so she can wish me a happy birthday. Here’s the thing. We both have April birthdays (hers is a few weeks after mine). When she was here, we would go out sometime between our two birthdays to celebrate them together (or any time near them).
She’s one of two people I actually get a birthday present for, and she gets one for me, too. She’s my soul sister, and I have been friends with her longer than anyone else in my life. I have joked with her that when we are both old, we’re going to be in an old folks’ home together, waving our canes at other prisoners inhabitants. We will shout things at them and just let the chaos rain down.
I love her with all my heart, and I know she feels the same way about me. A few decades ago, we were talking about the hoary conundrum of ‘your best friend and your spouse are both drowning ten feet away from each other. Who would you save first?’. I was the one who brought it up, though I don’t remember why. She got angry and heated about it (which is unlike her). She said she hated that question beacuse she loved me and her husband equally. I was skeptical, but she insisted it was true. Unlike me, she cannot lie with passion. If she said that, I knew she meant it.
She said that she really didn’t like how society portrayed romantic love as being above all other loves. I didn’t either, so it was something else we bonded over. It’s very specific to Western culture. Eastern culture had a very different view on that, obvioously.
I love her so much, and she is always in my heart. I want the world for her, and I would tear apart anyone who hurt her. That’s how I feel about her, and I know she feels the same about me. We have been tight since we first met–we clicked from the start. It was at a nonprofit. She was an admin assistant, and I was a day treatment counselor. We were the two youngest, too. Plus, we were the oddballs in our thoughts. By far.
I remembered that I went to talk to her because she had a cool tattoo on her wrist. There was a staff lunch we went to that we had to walk back from. She and I talked the whole way back to the agency (old house), I knew I wanted to be her friend. She was and is the coolest woman I have ever met, and I tell her so every now and again.
This was when I was twenty-two and she was twenty-three. So, yeah, that was over thirty years ago. Wow. We’ve been friends for longer than we haven’t.
There’s a concept in the queer world called queerplatonic relationships. It’s having a lifelong relationship with someone of the same/similar gender that is similar to a marriage without the sexual/lomantic aspects to it. I like to call it queertonic because it’s amusing to me. Plus, when I drank (very lightly), one drink I quite like was a gin and tonic.
I feel that I have that with two people in my life, but for now, I’ll concentrate on K. She and I are ride-or-die, and she’s one of the two people I talk to whenever I have important news or need comforting. I know she feels the same way about me, too. She was very pleased when I brought up the concept to her. I knew she would like it beacuse of her beliefs that friendships were as important as romantic relationships.
Even though I still don’t care about my birthday, I am much more mellow about it benig a marker for me going around the sun one more time. Ok, I’ll say that it’s still a bit of a wince on my part, but it’s mostly whatever. I don’t absolutely hate it, which I’ll take as a win. It still doesn’t feel real to me, though. Or rather, it doesn’t feel connected to me. Like, on a base level, I can acknowledge that I was born on this day. I am alive because of this day. That’s about all I can say about it.
At the end of the conversation with my parents, my mother asked me what I was going to do. I said nothing. Maybe get a piece of cake, but that would be the extent of it. I could feel the bitterness and anger creeping out of me, so I tried hard to tamp it down. I think I managed to mostly succeed, but there was a tinge of it still in my voice. So I’m not completely over it, but I’m getting close.
More to the point, I’m fine with having a little negativity still about my birthday. I’ve come such a far way with it, if I can’t make it all the way to neutral, that’s OK. I think that’s one thing Taiji has really helped me with–it’s lessened the impact of my negativity. It hasn’t stopped it completely, but I never expected it to. One thing my Taiji teacher was very clear and honest about was that Taiji was not a miracle cure, nor were the effects felt immediately.
I will say that when I started, I had really bad back pain. It started in the shoulders and the rest of my upper back, and it was like a really bad cramping. I just dealt with it because I had to (or so I thought). As I continued to practice, I started getting bad knee pain. That was fairly easy to fix because it was me pushing my knee either too far forward (past my knee) or collapsing it.
The back pain, though, was excruciating. I asked my teacher about it, and she told me to do the floor exercise we did in which you lay on the ground and then move your knee (each one) in different ways. We did it in our warmup, and I was skeptical it would work. She told me to do it three times to each side every day. I did it, and within three months, I felt a marked improvement. Like it was so real, I marveled about it to my teacher.
Within a year, my back pain was completely gone. I would not have believed it if it didn’t happen to me, but it’s true. And it’s remained gone for the most part. I still get some pain now and again, but it’s very short-lived.
That’s it for now. More later.