I was born early in the morning on the last day of August and I’ve had mixed feelings about it ever since. I mean, I’ve had mixed feelings about being born on and off throughout my life, but I’ve had mixed feelings about August and being born at its end pretty much constantly for my entire life. Most of that is due to the unfortunate coincidence that a lot of the most traumatic events of my childhood were concentrated towards the end of the summer every year, but a much more immediate and relevant part of that is due to my birthday frequently being overshadowed by people’s Labor Day plans. Sure, the trauma stuff hangs around and occasionally rears its head, but I can go to therapy about that and grow more capable of dealing with it. Being overshadowed by everyone’s favorite end-of-summer holiday is a yearly struggle that I’ve been unable to work around despite my thirty-three years of life. Hell, even on the years when my birthday isn’t connected to the weekend that includes Labor Day, I still struggle because that means I have to celebrate before my birthday rather than after it. I almost never manage to make plans in the years when it’s actually on Labor Day weekend because, no matter how far ahead I try to make my plans, everyone else winds up being busy. It’s a popular weekend! People are camping, grilling out, visiting relatives, or otherwise trying to enjoy the last gasps of summer before fall arrives in the Midwest. Even when I try to settle for having ANY kind of plans that weekend, for my birthday or otherwise, it rarely works out for any number of reasons. At this point in my life, after a decade and a half of trying, I’m mostly given up. There’s only so many time you can put up with people canceling on you or being unavailable despite your attempts to plan things super early. My bar has lowered enough that all I can really hope for is that people will remember to wish me a happy birthday.

This year was no different. I (feebly, I’ll admit) tried to make plans with my last couple of local friends (I’ve given up on all the others since I can’t even get them to carry on a conversation most of the time, much less actually express an interest in me and my life) and nothing panned out. All thoughts of going to Chicago to visit my siblings and have some fun eating Chicago foods I miss from growing up there had been set aside early in August, when I realized my back pain would make it agonizing to sit in a car for three hours, and then doubly-so when I bought a new mattress and scheduled its delivery for the day before my birthday. I wanted to enjoy my new mattress and see if it would give me the miracle fix to my back pain. So I made some soft plans to finish watching Delicious in Dungeon online with my two dear friends who live in New York, bought a bunch of food I could make, got myself a small cake, and settled in for a weekend of finding fulfillment by myself. All of which was knocked off balance from the very start by the fact that I woke up after only six hours of sleep on my new mattress because I was in too much pain to continue sleeping. As it turns out, if your back is messed up from sleeping on a concave mattress for a long time, it’s going to take a while for your back to readjust to proper support and a level mattress [as of editing this the day before it posts, I’m almost two weeks in and I’m still dealing with slowly diminishing pain that nevertheless prevents me from sleeping for more than six consecutive hours]. My attempts to sleep more failed pretty miserably and even trying to stretch out my back didn’t help much. Eventually, after much trying, I managed to get another hour of sleep, but all that meant was hauling myself out of bed around noon while still groggy and sore.

The rest of the day went a bit better from there, though it was not without its complications. Three of my relatives, not counting the two siblings I’m still in active contact with, reached out to me to wish me a happy birthday, which is a record number since 2020. So, on top of being sore and tired and really messing up the time estimate on how long it would take to make my pot roast in the crockpot (using two smaller roasts rather than one big roast, since the grocery store only had smaller ones, did not alter the cooking time the way all my research online suggested it would), I had to deal with my unresolved feelings about cutting contact with my entire extended family. There’s nothing that will get me spiraling quite like that topic since it often feels like I’m isolating myself from a network of people that could, potentially, be a supportive and enriching part of my life. Aside from, of course, the undeniable fact that literally none of them have directly asked me why I’m no longer around (which is the bar I set years ago for any of them to be involved in my life going forward). It’s incredibly emotionally draining, I gain absolutely nothing from it, and it pretty much always happens around my birthday and Christmas, which makes both of those days difficult to enjoy.

All of which is to say that I wound up having an anxiety attack around eight o’clock, once I was finished watching Delicious In Dungeon with my friends and realizing that it would be probably nine or ten before the pot roast was actually done. It was not pleasant and it took me an hour of sitting on my porch, staring at the stars as I tried to ignore the sounds of people celebrating a long weekend around me, to fully calm down. Even then, I was dealing with the lingering twitches of it until I finally collapsed into bed hours later. It was not a terribly pleasant day, despite being able to spend time watching a great show with two of my dearest friends.

The unpleasantness continued through the long weekend as my back hurt worse and worse (a journey that has peaked and begun to slowly diminish by the day I’m actually writing this), the stoneware interior of my crockpot fell off my counter where I’d left it to dry the night before (after checking to MAKE SURE it wouldn’t slip or fall) and broke after its second use ever, and I found out that National Novel Writing Month (the organization) has decided to not only embrace “AI” and LLMs but say that anyone who might suggest that they’re doing the wrong thing is classist and ableist. So now I’m struggling to move and work without pain, putting off looking up the cost of a new stoneware insert for my crockpot since I’m pretty sure I’d be better off just buying a new crockpot when they go on sale, and feeling even more adrift about my life as a writer now that one of the reasons I started this blog (and got to a point where writing every day is routine) has betrayed me as only a Masters of Business Administration “temporary” CEO could.

Needless to say, the entire weekend was not terribly restful and my chain of exhausted, increasingly foggy days continues as I never quite managed to get enough sleep to recover from my physical and mental exhaustion while being barraged by more emotional drain than I’ve dealt with all year. It’s been rough and I’m really not sure if I’m going to be able to make it to my next planned break from work (the last week of October, when I’m taking two days off work to play Dragon Age: The Veilguard). I mean, part of my whole “work a bunch of overtime and then take strategic long weekends coupled with no overtime weeks in order to rest” plan requires actually being able to get some rest and I’m not sure if I’ve been able to actually do that since late July, when my mattress began to cause me back pain in earnest. I wish I could speed up the process of breaking in and adjusting to my mattress, but this unfortunately will just take some time, no matter what I do (and I’m already doing everything I can). I wish I could put to rest my feelings about my extended family and my youngest sibling who, despite my attempts to maintain some form of contact, forgets my birthday every year and has, maybe once in the half-decade since I stopped seeing my family, started a conversation with me without some kind of motive (which were, I suspect, often given to them by our mother), but this disconnect plays into some of my deepest pains (the feeling of being uncared for and forgotten by the people I work to make sure know I care for and won’t forget). It’s a rough place to be, mentally and emotionally, that becomes impossible to ignore around my birthday, and this year is especially bad because I can’t even get enough sleep on the weekends anymore.

I don’t know what I’m going to do about all this. I’ve already had one therapy appointment to talk through all this with my therapist (I always make sure I’ve got an appointment in the week following my birthday because some form of this happens every year) and it didn’t help much. Sure, my back is doing better that it was, but it’s still not great to struggle to walk up the stairs because my back muscles are weak from the pain of my new mattress (and unable to properly recover since I NEED to sleep at least once every twenty-four hours). I don’t know how long it will take to get through this period of exhaustion and I know for a fact that none of my other lingering problems are going to be resolved until I can get enough sleep to focus, let alone recover some of my slowly dwindling energy. I’ll make it through this, I’m sure, since I’m not one to give up when I know that it’ll all work out in the long run, but it sucks being stuck in a miserable situation where your only proper solution is to continue wading through it. I can’t even really think about what to do about my local friends and ANY kind of birthday celebration since I’m too tired to make good decisions or take concrete actions. All I can do is muddle through, try to get as much sleep as I can, and avoid adding any new sources of stress to my life. We’ll see how that goes, I guess. It’s not like I’ve got a good track record of avoiding that stuff. Honestly, at this point, I’m not really wondering if something will. I’ve resigned myself to that. What I’m actually thinking about is what is going to be the next shoe to drop.