What Do We Do About the Bad Birthday?

I recently turned 30 and my birthday kind of sucked.

I planned a camping trip 2 months in advance for my birthday this year. I was very excited. I had envisioned the same scenario from my partner’s birthday a few years ago: over twenty people, a campground a stone’s throw from the Pacific Ocean, laughing, drugs, love, memories. First of all, I realize in retrospect that it is a pretty bad idea to anticipate your birthday being not only exactly as you imagined it in your mind, but as a replica of someone else’s awesome birthday. That is almost always going to set you up for disappointment unless your birthday exceeds the love joy and fun you anticipated or remembered from that other birthday party. It just felt like my birthday was a flop. A ton of people bailed semi-last-minute and my Leo heart was raging. I even texted one friend saying I wouldn’t be able to hang out until after the camping trip was over; I was too heartbroken! The thing about these situations is that you can try everything to make yourself feel better, including accepting that you feel bad, and you will still feel bad because you just do. Birthdays are incredibly hard. I forget this every year, and then the anxiety starts kicking in as soon as one tiny thing falls out of line. I know I’m setting my expectations very high, but it’s just painful. I want to be celebrated. I want to be loved. I wanted someone to surprise me and blow me out of the water. Just this once I wanted someone to exceed my expectations! It’s a lot of pressure to put that on one person though I guess I was maybe a little bit expecting that from some random friend or my partner, if I’m being honest. I don’t know. But I was really sad. I tried to not be as sad as I was but it just was what it was. I felt like turning 30 was going to be/supposed to be so epic and it was not. It made me depressed.

Not only was the birthday event itself difficult, but turning 30 has started to make me feel kind of crazy. I’ve started looking in the mirror and being like, “You are thirty. Look at that face. Is that the face of a thirty-year-old? Is the retinol working? Is the sunscreen working? Am I my mother, spiritually and physically?” Big questions loom in my mind. They ambush me throughout the day. Out of nowhere, I’ll have a realization that the pain I experience in my body every day is not going anywhere and actually, it’s going to get worse if I don’t do something about it. No one is going to save me. Time will keep moving forward. I will never be in my 20s again. Basically my life is ending. Don’t say it’s not. It is. You know it and so do I. Just kidding. I’m being facetious. It feels a little bit like that but it also feels a little bit like, “Oh, well, here I am!” I think I wrote about this before, but I feel like I’ve been 30 forever, but now I’m actually 30 and I’m like, oh shit. I was always the baby. I’m the youngest of 3 siblings, I’m the shrimp, I’m the baby. But I’m not really a baby anymore. What does that mean? I also have been thinking about it in terms of time…like, I notice that I keep thinking, “Oh my god, now I’m 30, am I different?” But it just so happened to be my birthday…it’s not as if you go to sleep 29, wake up 30, and then everything is different.

A lot of questions are weighing heavy on my mind these days! I’m in my Saturn return and I’m feeling raw and cut open. Cut open and fucking raw as hell on the inside. I am, how do you say, tartare. Feeling raw is so real. You feel exposed and vulnerable. Everything makes me cry or want to cry; I stopped eating pork and beef because I can’t stop thinking about how smart cows and pigs are, and every time I think about it I feel like my eyeballs and heart are going to explode with anguish. Then I start thinking about climate change and all those cows you drive by on the 5 and then I start thinking about how many times I’ve done that drive and all the lives I lived in California and I miss it a little but I don’t miss seeing all those suffering cows. And then I feel guilty and ashamed because I'm not doing enough to show how much I care about methane gas and climate change and carbon emissions but at least I’m not Taylor Swift. I don’t know how to soothe myself. Jia Tolentino wrote something about trying to quell climate anxiety while also taking personal responsibility for all your bullshit and how she uses compostable diapers and she talked to some therapist about it and the therapist was like you’re not special because you use compostable diapers. I like Jia Tolentino but she might just be one of the same neoliberal New Yorker writers who writes about stuff that makes her seem like a radicalized deep thinker when really she’s just like vote for Kamala bleep bloop blap being a woman is hard bla bla bla. Maybe (probably) I’m just jealous because Jia Tolentino is successful and I’m not.

“No prospects,” I think as I reflect on my life as a newly 30-year-old. Nothing on the horizon. What will I do? I’m torn between going to grad school to make a liveable salary and have a normal life, but I’m also scared that that might be another fantasy just like every other fantasy I’ve ever had about the way (my) life should be. And life is always just what it is and it’s the same but different all the time. You know what I mean? Like moving to New York. It’s as special as I thought it would be and yet here I am, the same me. No matter what, I am left with myself. No matter where I go I can’t hide. How relieving; how grueling. Another day, another rollercoaster of emotions. I’ll be in the middle of a sentence and realize that I might start crying. I’ll watch a video online and find the salt of tears on my tongue as they break down the dam of my sad little mouth. I’m so fucking poetic for that. “I think I’m also worried that I’m not taking care of myself,” I think to myself after looking over at the baguette and granny smith apple I just bought from Dimes Market. I’m eating a lot of canned tuna these days, and I’ve single-handedly kept the doors of a Thai food restaurant open this last month. I lied when I said I’m not as successful as Jia Tolentino. I’m famous because I just won an award for being Doordash’s most prolific ambassador!

I don’t even order from Doordash that much, but every time I do I think about all the people who probably never even use Doordash and I’m like, I’m such a fucking delinquent. Then I feel bad for thinking that about myself. You just have to eat. I knew that before I turned 30. If you’re reading this and you’re hungry I command you to eat. It doesn’t matter what. I keep telling myself that it’s fine to eat canned tuna with a baguette for lunch every day because on Alone they survive for months at a time off of Moose jerky that might even have mold or mouse shit on it. So actually I’m thriving. But of course, as we all know, there’s always some bitch out there in her fucking Lulu lemons doing better than you. And her butthole is so tight and she’s proud of that because she’s aging backwards even from her butthole and I bet my butthole is getting all saggy and fucked up looking. I just stayed at a hotel with a full-length mirror mounted to the wall and I was like, damn, I never get to look at my pussy and my asshole up close. So I faced away from the mirror and did a forward fold and saw my red, wrinkled face peeking between my thighs as I inspected my asshole and my pussy. I think (I know) I have a hemorrhoid, but I couldn’t tell by looking at my asshole if I saw the hemorrhoid or not. If I Google “hemorrhoid” it’s going to show me someone’s asshole with like, fifty exploded hemorrhoids on it, which will not be very helpful for me. Anyway, my asshole isn’t saggy, and I think I saw the hemorrhoid, and my pussy is just kind of there, chillaxing as usual. Nobody talks about this, but it’s hard to look at your own pussy, and it can cause some severe neck pain. All the more reason to get better at yoga and be a good 30-year-old. To stretch so hard and good that I can look at my pussy any day of the week without needing to mount a full-length mirror to my wall. Although that might be a good idea anyway. What if I don't even know my fashion is suffering in New York?

Thirty thirty thirty. I know that a big part of this is the Saturn return. For real. There’s a lot of stuff I don’t believe in (sorry) but I do believe in astrology and I do believe that Saturn returns can rock your shit. The thing is that I’m not necessarily getting my shit rocked in a bad way, it’s just that it’s all a lot of feelings, and because of capitalism, sometimes there isn’t space and room and time to feel them as expansively as I’d like to, and that obviously makes me fucking depressed. I know we all know how bad capitalism sucks, but I think about it every day. I’m kind of having my ~moment~ with capitalism, not in a chic way. The moments are always lurking but part of the pain of my Saturn return feels like a real grappling and coming to terms with capitalism because capitalism is the cause of so much suffering and pain for all people, especially in America. That upsets me so much. I’m like, is this really (my) life? When I think about how hard it is for me to function and how I have to function in society and how I have to function to live in New York City and all the things I could be doing with my time to simply enjoy my life it makes me so sad and gives me terrible anxiety. I want to connect with my friends. I want to explore. And you have to hustle and work so hard to be able to get by doing the things you want to do, and even then it’s such a game. It makes it so much less fun to do the things you want to do with your life and time because of the constant pressure to create capital and become capital. It’s so disgusting and disturbing and disheartening. It just makes me want to explode. It’s the biggest reason for so many of the worst things that happen in America and we are just living in it every day—and the worst of it is certainly not reigning down on me of all people. Sigh. Anyway.

Well, I think that’s all I’ve got. I’m ready to birth this blog post into the world just as much as I am ready to have a baby, which is pretty much every day. When I see and hold a baby, I’m like, “Man, this is the good shit.” But it’s sad because many people don’t get it or feel that way and I think they think I’m a sellout because I want to have a baby, but whatever. Saturn return. I’m also scared that people won’t think I’m hot anymore if I have a baby. See how shallow I am? See how vulnerable I am? YOLO.