Listen to Natahna reading Big Feels 7.0 here👇🏻
“Any reflections on 31?” My angel friend is asking me over a table of birthday decadence — platters of oysters, Prosecco for the table, steak frites to share on the way.
I open the door to the room in my brain that holds my reflections: three cute, but ultimately terrifying bats hanging upside down yell at me, a tumbleweed rolls by.
“Not yet, I don’t know, I haven’t thought about it.”
I’m usually dining out on reflections for the entire month leading up to my birthday. I mean, hello, reflecting is my whole schtick.
This October, the month was given away to other important jobs, mainly preserving my emotional safety after the firm tug alluded to last Big Feels.
Here is a poem on how I’m doing now:
Fuck I love myself and how sweet and soft my spirit remains Oh god how quick the bad seeps in but still how fast I absorb it into this squish of good I am free because I choose to be hard earned and felt completely
So anyways: I was arriving at my birthday feeling unprepared in a way, but very lucky. There is no better place to be unprepared than with some of your closest friends in a big city wearing horny boots, eating well, laughing loud, swapping first-love stories, drinking the lesbian drink of the moment, and dancing until bedtime.
The next morning, I could feel it. This birthday intended to do more than prompt reflection. This one was the reset.
Look, my birthdays have been pretty rough in mostly private ways for 6 years now. As Tolstoy said, “All happy [birthdays] are alike, but every unhappy [birthday] is unhappy in its own way.”
I feel silly for caring about my birthday so much. Even sillier that I expect others to care as well. (To be fair, I have never claimed, and will never claim, to not be silly.)
I used to hold my breath waiting for my birthday, then spend the whole day exhaling. One long, 24 hour exhale. 364 days of tight lungs.
My own sacred holiday, it was the one day a year guaranteed that I didn’t have to do anything. I didn’t have to fix anyone. And everyone made it explicitly clear that they loved me. As a codependent-anxious-attachment-neurodivergent-people-pleaser — what a relief! Oh god!
I hold my breath a lot less these days. I haven’t fixed a single person this whole year. More people tell me that they love me in a no-strings kind of way than I could ever have even tried to hope for.
This is the reset.
Here are my reflections on 31:
Old habits die hard, but they do die.
My gut is a good one and worth listening too.
My people are the best in the business (and in this case, the business is life).
I don’t have to get any of this shit right.
I don’t know, I think that’s it.
Talk soon,
Natahna
The Recommends: Bleaching your eyebrows. Come on. Why not?
Oh thoseeee are some good reflections! ✨