Homecoming

Hi. It's me. Today is my twenty-fifth birthday, so I'm feeling aware of time. I keep getting new moles and spots and things and it's weird, it reminds me that the body is always changing. It never stops being weird. You get used to the form your body takes, or at least, I do, and it feels like a long-loved cushion which remembers the shape of my head. But then I look again and its different. And I look out the window and it's different. And I walk around town and shop fronts are different. They moved the statue in the centre of town years ago, but I still feel strange when I see it in its new place.

Last year I wrote about how age is good. I still have those sentiments and take time to be grateful for everything I am, and to celebrate everything I am. Time is opportunity. Time is a basket to throw the things you care most about into. I am scared, like most people, probably, that I'm wasting time. That I'm not being enough, or that in some way I'm not 'me' enough. Like by now I should be more 'me', even though I am always me.

Sometimes I feel like I am every person currently living, all at once. Like I have a thousand feelings and ideas that contradict each other. There is no ultimate self to find. I'm already her. I want to be better and do more and I want to be inventive and passionate in an endless growing loop, but y'know, I'm already in that loop. I'm already me.

The preciousness and delight of experience has uncoiled itself across my life and I wonder if maybe my focus should be less on being and more on doing. Because I think I'm already being. I don't want to perpetuate a perfectionism that tries to hard to catch the butterfly (or moth) of vague and muddy and mysterious and dreamy self! But doing is where I flourish. I have tested my perseverance in creation and exploration and love, and that's what grows like a big, cute, ridiculous sunflower.

I have never really given much attention to celebrating my birthdays, but I'm going to start doing it properly. I'm going to have the most delicious cakes and a night out and a large gin & tonic. I'm going to celebrate myself and my time, because time is worth welcoming properly.

This year there will be excursions and holidays and trips into the forest. I'm going to see notoriously 'interesting' film The Room at the cinema, and director Tommy Wiseau will be there. I'm going to Iceland and Boston (hopefully). I'm going to visit a flying saucer (it's an art installation). And I'm going to be perfect as myself, possibly wearing sequins and carrying lots of fruits in my pockets, aged twenty-five.