thirty one

It's birthday time again.

Last year I wrote what was in retrospect an unnecessarily harsh post to mark my birthday, about how the year to come was going to be hard and I was going to have to do unpleasant and difficult things for my own good. I'm not going to write that kind of post again.

This is going to be an odd year where everything changes, but what that means is that I have choice. I get to choose where to work, I can choose where I want to live. I can choose what to do with my weeknights without feeling like I've let anyone down. I have obligations to my partner and my family and a few of my friends, but none to jobs I dislike, houses that are slowly disintegrating, or entire groups of loose acquaintances. This year I can do what I like.

For the first time in a very long time, I actually want to be working. I want to have a job and an office and vaguely annoying co-workers, and I want to be showing people that I'm smart and good at lots of things. For the last few years of my working life I spent every morning battling the dread in my stomach and wondering if there was any way I could get out of it, and this feeling of actively wanting to be employed and useful is so foreign to me that it's taken a couple of weeks to work out that that's what it is.

I'm remembering what it's like to want to learn. I've been taking pride in my dressmaking skills recently, beginner though I might be, and I've been excited about getting better. I've been thinking about new dance classes, singing lessons, ways to improve my Italian. I've wanted to start cooking again. I've thought about learning something completely outside my normal wheelhouse; getting an A level in a science, learning indoor plumbing or some other extraordinarily practical domestic skill. I've thought about learning illustration, to see if I can teach myself to draw something that doesn't look like an inebriated ghost. I've thought about performing, doing something fun that will silence at least one of the voices in my head telling me you can't. More than anything else depression took from me, I've missed curiosity.

I can see a future for this year the way I couldn't for previous years. 2013 was completely about the present, 2014 was confusing, and in 2015 I couldn't see anything at all. This year I can feel opportunities for something better. I want to feel more like myself while growing with another person, to let out some of the things I've always hidden because of a nonspecific fear. I've got high hopes for this weird-ass uncertain year.

30-year-old Jen had a miserable time of it. 31-year-old Jen is going to have fun.