42
A birthday letter to myself 🎉🎂🥳
Yesterday was my birthday, and as part of my morning writing practice, I wrote this letter to myself. I share it with you because the voice here feels true to me and also because I believe there is power in sharing declarations. I am so very grateful to all of you for being here, humbled and honored by your readership.
Dear Nishta,
42 on the 24th - is there such a thing as an inverse golden birthday? This one is feeling pretty special, I think because we’ve fought for it. You’ve been seeking yourself for some years now, laying down old tools in recognition of the fact that they could not get you where you wanted next to go. The striving, the ambition, the hustle, the pushing-through-to-do-it-all—you examined the yield of that way of living and found it wanting. Or rather, your body said “No more.”
It’s taken you a long time to listen—understandable, given how many years of programming, how many voices are constantly telling all of us “More more more” and “Go go go” and “Do do do.” Some of these voices mean well and others don’t, but the voice that matters most is the quiet one inside of you, the one that speaks in God’s presence alone and seeks to satisfy nothing and no one but the truth.
Learning new ways, how to work with new tools, has been work, even if you didn’t think so. Your body has forced you to say “No” where you for so long defaulted to “Yes,” sent you to bed despite your protestations and resentment. This writing voice of yours has lain seemingly dormant and you despaired of her ever returning.
God’s timing is not our timing, so the saying goes, and like any platitude, this one can be deployed to justify shitty things. Even still, you’ve come to understand the truth of this statement in a more nuanced way, a way afforded to you by the wild gyrations of your brain which trip the wires distinguishing pleasure from pain, now from later, atman from brahman. You know, without equivocation and rom experience, that this momentary reality is not the only one. This self is expansive, infinite. Time is gummy and porous.
And so, with these glimpses, these gifts, you have learned to surrender. Your present life is one you never could have conjured in the past—that you thought there was a path and that you would follow it as instructed to its natural end. But there was a fork in the road and you didn’t so much choose to go down it as you were shoved in that direction, but thank goodness.
When Papa died eighteen years ago, you knew grief would change you and you decided to let it. Before and after became separate eras, Nishtas who passed the personality torch between realities. Now it is time to admit that pain has changed you and there is no going back. Certainly, you will be happy for the pain to end, to no longer greet pain as part of your daily life, but waiting for that day is no way to live. You’ve seen what happens on a societal level when people rush to “get back to normal” rather than integrate the learning that change offers. You don’t want to make the same mistake.
Pain has tenderized you, though it hardly seemed you could be any more tender than you started out, small human with massive feelings, words pouring out of you from the start. But what was long romantic has now transferred to the pragmatic; at 42, it’s sexier to be in reality than to rely on wishful thinking. You no longer have time to waste.
Pain renders precious the most ordinary moments: your daughter reaching for your hand in the parking lot, the birthday sign your best friend’s daughter made for you, the sound of an old friend’s voice as he reads aloud to his children at bedtime. Life sparkles with these jewels, even as it is awash with sorrow. You find yourself quietly sated by their beauty.
The hardest part is letting go, and you are still learning how that one works. “No” comes more easily, but not without a twinge in your gut. You have a tremendous appetite for living, but there is no way to do it all. This is simply what’s so.
Magically, you find that you have what you need readily available—relationships, both new and old, that offer you flexibility and grace, cheer you when you ask for support, cheer you, when all this time you have been scared to say “I need help,” as if admitting to need would somehow clue people in to the fact that you are human. What a grand and silly thing to be, a human, capable of such tenderness and compassion, able to make meaning and art and so too able, when hurt and afraid, to wreak tremendous havoc and cause terrible pain. You have seen your own dangerous capabilities all too well in recent years, confronted the truth of what you can do if you do not care for yourself, and you are better for the looking. No more turning away or pretending.
You are a writer, Nishta, and a teacher. You feed people in all kinds of ways, and giving yourself permission to be who you are feeds you. This is what it means to honor God in your living, something you have long sought to do, since you were a baby child in the kitchen of your childhood home, knees to the linoleum floor in prayer. To honor God may not always be easy, but it is simple. Let’s try not to overcomplicate it too much this coming year, okay? Also, let’s have a lot of fun.
Love and love,
Nishta