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This month, I celebrated my 31st birthday with a different viewpoint on birthdays and life, which left me feeling more optimistic about what the future holds.
Birthdays had been a source of anxiety for me and for most people I know. They have served as an annual reminder of the aging process and whether one has obtained success according to society’s definition of what that means – which is often equated with accumulating wealth and material possessions.
In my early twenties, my birthdays were fun and all about painting the town red.
I did not really care much about whether I was successful or not because I was a student and I did not have bills to worry about.
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But in my mid and late twenties, when I was working and had been “adulting” on my own for several years, I suddenly found myself being anxious about my birthdays.
Marking the day I was born became a reminder of what I had not achieved and, sadly, I would compare myself with others.
These are some of the questions I would ask myself that only left me stressed, emotionally drained and psychologically impotent.
But this year I chose not to confine myself to the standards of what society defines success to be. Being alive at this age is already a source of success for me.
You never know what life has in store. As Forrest Gump said in that movie, life is like a box of chocolates; you never know what you are going to get.
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And, as he illustrated when he started running to make sense of life, this life is a journey, and a journey that requires one to run their own race.
It is against this background, then, that I would say birthdays shouldn’t be a reminder of how old we are getting or whether we are falling behind compared with our peers.
I now choose to view birthdays as a “rebirth” of some kind and a gift to write another chapter of this life journey.
