For most of my life, I haven’t enjoyed my birthday. Once the shine of new toys and celebrations wore off during my childhood (following yet another ruined birthday party) I was mostly only interested in my birthday as the vehicle my parents used to give their children toys. Most of the time, unless we got a gift of money from a relative (this only applied to cash since all checks were deposited in our college saving account), got a reward for good grade, or saved up our allowances, our parents wouldn’t buy us anything unnecessary. They’d take us to the library or to the video rental store (and eventually the video game rental store) once a week each, but we rarely got anything permanently ours outside of our birthdays, Christmas, and the one souvenir we were allowed during family trips that happened to go somewhere that had a gift shop. Which meant that by the time I was eight or nine, birthdays had become just a means of getting new toys and books that I could keep (being able to keep something as my own was a big deal as a kid with three siblings and a “we will buy ‘big’ things for the family but not a specific child” family rule). They stayed that for a few years and, after the month of August was basically ruined for me by a few years of consecutive traumas during the month, stopped being special. I mean, I was so detached from my birthday that I got through all but the last half hour of my eighteenth birthday before I remembered that it was, in fact, my birthday since I was so busy at college with my new friends and my family wasn’t the sort to reach out via phone calls or texts at the time.
Continue readingFound Family
I’ve Been Inspired By Anime To Do More Therapy
Almost exactly a year ago, right after Akira Toriyama passed away, I wrote about Dragon Ball and how formative my introduction to manga was. Since then, I’ve mostly held off on rereading the series so I could do it during a time that I was capable of properly feeling joy (rather than just ignoring the pain I was in for all of last year), but I have spent a lot of time, on and off, thinking back to my childhood library and my introduction to the series. And comics (specifically the ones that didn’t appear in the “funny pages” of the newspaper my parents got) as a whole, since those were all sorted together. Surprisingly, out of basically no where, some of those memories became relevant again. You see, in the early days of my local library putting comics out in a place that kids like me could easily see them, there was one other manga series available for people to borrow. I avoided it at all costs because, even then, I was aware of the expectations placed on me by my parents that I avoid anything that might be construed as “girly” or “soft” and the image of a young woman and two young men on the cover screamed “romance” to me in a way I absolutely couldn’t have verbalized as a child. So, rather than invest in my emotional intelligence (which, coincidentally, was something my parents wanted me to develop despite them often signaling that it wasn’t a masculine trait like all the others they tried to cultivate in me), I invested in my creative intelligence and passed over the inexplicably named “Fruits Basket” manga in favor of the action-y one that was filled with fighting and whatnot.
Continue readingA New Type Of Going Home For The Holidays
As scattered and ever-too-short as it was, it was nice to spend the holidays with family this year. I think, between finally making peace with my decision to separate from most of my biological family, processing all the emotions from that, and doing the work to start creating new habits and routines in my own life, this was the first time the holidays have felt “good” since… I genuinely don’t even know. And they weren’t even all good! I burned the shit out of my hand on Christmas Day! I overextended myself cleaning and cooking for my two siblings’ visit the weekend after Christmas! I even had to deal with the dwindling pain of a medication course that seems to have taken almost fourteen months for me to discover that it wouldn’t have any lasting effect beyond what happened in the first two months. It wasn’t a great holiday, but I’m already looking back on it fondly, which is a significant change from literally every other holiday season I’ve ever experienced where I immediately tried to forget it. I really enjoyed seeing my chosen family–the couple whose wedding I was in back in 2023–and my two remaining biological family members. I got to see friends on New Year’s Eve, meet some people I’d only ever talked to online, attend my first New Year’s Eve party in half a decade (I hadn’t gone to one since 2018 since I was feeling ill and emotionally exhausted after my first holidays away from my biological family in 2019 and then, well, because Covid for the rest of them), and got to have a great hour and a half chat with a friend after I picked her up from the airport. It was a great time, even if I’m incredibly bummed out that the demands of my work life and my careful recovery from the aforementioned medication I’m no longer taking mean that I won’t be spending much time physically around people until sometime in March at the earliest. I’m just glad I got to see so many people I care about.
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