Birthday

My birthday is almost here...
ah, birthdays...
the past-
birthdays-
unpleasant...

remembering my youth makes me feel
like I'm right back there.
I feel so surprised every year
at how visceral and physical the experience is.
I just crumple inwards and
choke drown
trip fall.

Invariably I try to stay positive.
Inevitably I want to tell the people I looked up to them
I want to call them up and tell them how much happier a person I am now because of them
I want to sit down, have a beer, and ask them how they've been.
I can't.
I'm certain many of them have no idea that I looked up to them.
I wasn't friends with these people then.
I've even tried to reach out to some and they've all seemed displeased that I looked up to them.
and I'm back to
choke drown
trip fall.

I think of teachers I'd like to tell,
"Without you or someone like you, I'd have killed myself in the trial that is High School/Middle School."
but I'm nowhere near close enough to say that without seeming like a lunatic.
I wasn't ever close enough to anyone back then.
Of course, that's not entirely true I did have one decent friend from 10th Grade on
and that friendship did mean the world to me.
But of course, what I really want to do is rewrite my childhood into a positive one.
I want to reach out to the people who I liked and by connecting to them now
rewrite my childhood and clear the suffocating experiences from my throat.
By removing the pain, I'd be able to take back all those times I was too emotional to do anything
and rewrite all the mistakes I made.
I want to reach through the people who I looked up to
and hold and hug the younger me.
All to erase the experiences of my youth from my memory.

Most of the year I am OK with my past.
I understand what happened and why.
I see that I've grown to become much more than the person I want to be.
I can look at my current life and smile while acknowledging the sadness I experienced.
But every year my birthday comes around and
I feel so flooded and overwhelmed by memories that I go crazy.
Every year I do different things to cope
and every year the success of this coping varies.

This year I am going to take a step forward in my life that makes me quite nervous.
I am going to cut my hair short.
I have always dreamt, since elementary school, of being a woman with short hair.
As I went through my transition I grew my hair out as a way of strengthening the fortifications of my gender appearance.  I believe that one of the saddest aspects of transitioning is using gender norms to achieve the appearance your gender.  As much as I have desired to self actualize rather than just pass, I have not been able to bring myself to cut my hair short.  So this year I will expel emotions along with unwanted hair.
I will take one more step towards myself and instead of rewriting my past, I will write a better future.

Also, I'm writing this blog post,
so yeah.
My condolences to whomever is having a birthday.