Birthday letters (II)

turning twenty-eight

Hi, it’s my birthday today. Last year I wrote myself a letter and I figured I should do it again. Thank you for continuing to be here. It’s such an incredible gift. For the month of October, I’m offering a 28% discount on paid subscriptions (monthly & annual). Or, you can share this post on social or with someone you think would enjoy it.

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How you made it to twenty-eight¹:

1. Have more sleepovers with friends

When you live in a city with friends scattered throughout a handful of neighborhoods, many weekends can and should include crashing at one of their apartments. Ask to borrow a t-shirt before curling up beside them. However many hours of sleep you get is beside the point. It’s a pleasure just to share a bed. Get bleary-eyed coffee in the morning and linger. Wear their clothes home. This becomes another way of keeping them with you. 

2. Sometimes you have to throw a bit of a tantrum 

No matter how many years pass, you realize again and again that you’ve just grown into a tall child. This means you don’t need to hide when you hurt. There are good ways to throw a tantrum that don’t include making scenes at parties or screaming matches. It will take you all year to learn this. An occasional tantrum is a way for you to figure how to say what you need. Expressing hurt is messy. You just have to be ready to clean up after yourself. 

3. Always pull over when you have the impulse to pull over 

Trust that you’ll want to see it and trust that you’ll have time. Pull over. Make the pit stop. For fireworks, for the Pez museum, for the worst coffee in America, for another thrift store, for a New England graveyard where someone takes the best picture of you yet, and then you finally understand that they do love you. 

One night in December traveling back after the holidays, you pull over on the turnpike and almost die. You’ll spend the next few days googling how to know if you’re dead. This will, unsurprisingly, make you all the more grateful to be alive. So you don’t regret pulling over, even that time.

4. Take as many pictures of your friends as you can

This year you bought a film camera. It wasn’t expensive or the best one. Give yourself this gift, a new hobby, but also a new way of investing in your friends’ lives and spirits. There is something magical about the way these pictures turn out. And the same for ones taken of you. Hand over the camera when they ask. Don’t hide your face. Let the people love you in this way. Because they see you. 

5. Don’t let too many days pass without journaling

Keep notes for the novel you’re going to write that you don’t yet know what it’s about. Each day should be kept safe. The missives on the train. Write down what you don’t like about yourself. Then a few months later, be incredulous that you could hate yourself when everything turned out to be so good. Write down when you knew a change was going to come. Because it won’t be that day, but it will be the day you knew you were ready. 

6. If you believe you live a charmed life, even more luck will come to you

You get everything you want. You have everything you wanted. Repeat this to yourself. It’s your prayer. It contains more than you can articulate. There’s a morning when you’re walking home, you realize it’s true. And it always has been.

7. Resist the idea that something has to be planned to be beautiful 

It’s true that you should expect everything, then the unexpected can never happen. Stop loving the past and accept the ambiguous future. There isn’t really another option. Nothing is in your control, so planning is counterintuitive. 

This goes for your social life, for major purchases, for work, for anything you do to your body. You don’t have to plan your tattoos, carefully choosing an artist. As your friend says, people didn’t have this luxury before phones. Regardless if the lines are perfectly straight or not, your body will change. That’s the one thing you’re allowed to plan on. 

8. Unfortunately, The Perks of Being a Wallflower’s most famous quote is still true

You do accept the love you think you deserve. So you need to decide what you deserve and how you might go about getting it. Nothing less. Be vicious about those terms. If this means not wanting to sleep with people unless you feel romantically attracted to them, that’s fine too. 

Hurting is a learning opportunity, but you do get to choose your pain. You can accept people for who they are and still love them. But you don’t need to hurt yourself in the process. And that goes for hurting others too. You’ll learn more this way because hurting others bears consequences and subsequently more lessons. But if you have the choice to not hurt people, choose wisely. 

If someone is going to be hurt by you protecting yourself, they probably weren’t going to protect you in the first place. Your friend will tell you this on a Sunday while you’re sitting on their couch shoveling takeout into your mouth. Listen to them because they’re right. Be grateful for such casual wisdom.

9. Learn the difference between labyrinths and mazes

A maze is meant to get you lost. A labyrinth is meant to lead you somewhere safe and secret. This applies to people too. It’s in your best interest to figure out early on if someone is a maze or a labyrinth.  

10.  Asking for clarity is hard but necessary

Saying I love you if only to hear it back is a human thing. It’s ok to tell them you love them and think about them often. It’s also ok to need them to say the same things back in their own words. 

You just need be sensitive to when someone tells you what you want to hear because it’s easier than deciding what they want from you. You need to understand that the answer you’re looking for is in their nonanswer.

When they tell you they can’t give you what you want, believe them. 

Seeing it through to see it through isn’t necessary. You’re allowed to run whenever you want to. No explanations or apologies or groveling. Take off. You can run pretty fast as long as your shoelaces are tied and your mind is made up. Just don’t turn back once you’re ready. 

11. If someone asks good questions, do everything you can to get them into your life

Here’s something you realize: someone who asks questions has a mind you want to get to know. You also realize that having a fine mind may be the most important quality to you. If someone doesn’t ask any questions, this is probably a sign that they aren’t interested in knowing you in the same way you want to know them. That’s their choice, but once again, it’s not your job to convince them otherwise. 

12. Your phone is the vessel through which you hold onto everyone you’ve ever loved

Text your sibling. Fix your shit with them. Send them voice memos while walking to the train. The mundane and the watersheds are both worth sharing.

Spend the day texting your best friend until it becomes an art. Try to hold your laughter at your desk until you can’t and you bubble over. Let the pile of jokes grow between you until it feels like your minds have melded into one. 

Call your parents while walking around your apartment so it feels like they’re right there with you. 

Ask for help from your neighbors. Share your location. Pick up their packages and check on their cat when they ask you at the last minute. 

Answer their call at two in the morning. Sit on the bathroom floor and tell them about all the gossip they’ve missed. Wish they were here. 

Turn on read receipts to hold yourself accountable to responding in a timely manner. On the flip side, you don’t have to respond to every text immediately. 

Send the “miss you” text.

13. Punishing someone with silence isn’t a way to get them to reach out

This especially doesn’t work if you’re trying to make someone understand they’ve hurt you. People aren’t mind readers even if you think they are. You have to tell them, even though it’s hard. Same goes for asking for help. You’ll be surprised at who comes running and who doesn’t. Don’t begrudge the ones who don’t. Give them that grace in hopes they would extend the same to you. 

14. Being an adult means knowing when to act grown up and when to act like a kid

Once again, call your parents. And also pay your bills on time, but don’t beat yourself up for falling victim to ATM fees. They are a fact of living as much as death and taxes. Go to the zoo and press your nose up against the glass like every little kid next to you. Run through the sprinklers in Central Park at midnight. Get seven hours of sleep when you can, but stay up until sunrise after at least one party. Unfortunately it’s true that water and exercise cure many ills.

By the way, there isn’t a meaningful difference between kids’ cereal and adult cereal.

15. Have more parties for no reason

A martini party. A karaoke party. A beautiful disaster. A fruit party. A crush party. Birthdays. Scenes. A dinner gathering with a smattering of people from every era of your life. Storytelling circles. A ham party. An anticipatory funeral for your sick cat that turns out to be a spell that makes her well. A soup gathering. A potluck. A goodbye.

16. Saying no is a kindness not a cruelty 

Someone wouldn’t want you to hang out with them if they felt you were only doing it out of obligation. You don’t have to like someone because they are polite to you. Not liking everyone demonstrates a healthy level of skepticism and discernment. It means you have taste. You don’t have to say yes to everything because you’re afraid that you’ll never be invited again or someone is going to be upset with you. People don’t forget you, they aren’t so quick to discard. The issue is you think you deserve to be discarded. Once you stop thinking that, you will understand you don’t owe anyone your time but yourself.  

17. Cultivate rituals that will bring you back to yourself

A run listening to the same song when your anxiety runs high. A perfect baguette, some cheese, white wine, and the ripest pear on your fire escape when you feel lonely. Taking a long, hot bath in unreasonable weather when you hate your body. Listening to the best love songs you’ve ever heard with the best people you’ve ever loved when you feel unlovable. Walking on your favorite bridge when you both feel at your luckiest and that your luck’s run out.

18. Microdosing mushrooms can temporarily banish body dysmorphia 

You don’t know how, but it works every time. You can see your body for exactly what it is. A body. And you don’t mind what you see. This carries an additional lesson: you have to feed yourself. So you cut the bullshit yogurt lunches. Sometimes you need to order steak frites because your body is screaming for iron. You start holding what tastes good in your mouth for longer. To not just chew, but actually taste. 

19. Introduce yourself first

This is the simplest gesture of community and something you can do more often than you do. One day you walk into the coffee shop and ask the person serving you what their name is. Don’t wait until someone asks you at a party. Introduce yourself to the writer you admire. Introduce yourself to the people who work at the bodega. To your neighbors. It’s easy enough to do this, and you wonder why you have been so shy about saying your name. If only to hear it in someone else’s mouth. It feels good to be known in this way. 

20. There is such a thing as a perfect day and you can have many of them

This includes being caught in the rain. It includes watching as the setting sun cuts lines onto the grass in Prospect Park. Writing collaborative poems on empty stomachs. A blue day when you don’t have work. A bright white day sleeping in the sun on Coney Island. A gray day at the Cloisters. A Sunday when you see two movies in one day and walk sixty-four blocks alone. Evenings when you walk through the Lower East Side listening to the perfect song and believe your life is just like the movie version in your head. Because it is. 

21. Having good taste means appreciating the high and the low

You can have champagne taste on a potato chip budget. This year you accepted that it’s ok to like fine things and not punish yourself for wanting or enjoying them. Where you come from will inform the way you see luxury and utility for the rest of your life. This is good. You get to have a taste of the fine things through others’ generosity and your own willingness to believe you’re allowed to have those things. A beautiful bottle of wine, a sweater that you let yourself try on that you won’t be able to afford but imagine if you could. This refinement allows you to appreciate the mundane. Because sometimes nothing is better than Diet Coke and fries from McDonald’s or marathoning a teen drama until you fall asleep. 

(By the way, you don’t have to have good taste in music. It doesn’t actually matter if you do or don’t. Or be embarrassed that you listen to so much boygenius that it wins you free concert tickets. Your devotion is cool, even if you like music teenagers listen to.)

22. You’re never going to learn how to dress for the weather so you might as well wear what you want  

Wear the ridiculous outfit to the function. No one is going to care either way. Wear things that make you feel looser, not more constricted. Fuck with gender. Be the boy. Dress like your crush. Your hair will be fine no matter what you do with it. Believe it when someone tells you that you look lovely. 

23. Believe in your talent 

You don’t need to belittle yourself. You are talented. You are a writer. You do believe in yourself and in the work you’re supposed to do. Not everything you write will be incredible, but it’s all part of the greater body of work you were always meant to create. You hope that one day you can recognize that you are good and beautiful in other ways, too. 

24. Meaning you can write a novel

That being said, you wake up one day in May and decide by this time next year, you’ll have the first draft of a novel. So you begin to work in earnest. There’s no voice in your head telling you it’s impossible. Words appear on a page. And then another. You can’t wait to keep writing. An evening in September reveals that you wrote 75,000 words in three months. You’re allowed to brag about the fact you’re writing a novel—as long as you continue the work. 

25. You don’t want to die

Of course you don’t. Even the days you feel like you do, you don’t. The sun will come back out. The rain will end eventually. You don’t have to. All your superstitions about twenty-seven as a death year can be just that—superstitions. You were meant to make it through, to love the passage of time. On one of the last days of twenty-seven, you will lock eyes with a beagle on the sidewalk. Something passes between you. The knowledge that you both are impermanent, but you’re here now. It’s silly, but you walk home with tears in your eyes. Things will continue to change. But you want to be here to witness it all.

26. Kiss your friends 

Often and without discretion. Make out with them. Kiss them on the neck and tell them they are special. That you will never meet someone like them again. Know it’s true. 

27. You are selfish

And that can be a good thing. It’s up to you how much you want to change that. 

28. Departures make arrivals so much sweeter

Love is not scarce. Love doesn’t go away no matter how hard you try to shake it. Love is not conditional on how often you see or talk to someone. Still, you will fuck up. And you will do so often. You’re the most selfish person in the world some days. You don’t love people right, not always. But you try. There are scores of people who still love you. Big, true love is possible and you already have so much of it.

One day at a picnic, your friend draws the three of cups. In tarot, the cups represent matters of the heart. You also know it means to overflow. To spill over, like you so often do. You don’t want to change this about yourself.

This year, you’ll find that many people leave. Sometimes without announcement. Sometimes the end of the era is a boom. Sometimes it’s you who leaves. You might fall apart when someone goes, but when they do, there’s a door that remains open. Imagine who might walk through. Check the lock and make sure it’s unlatched so you can love the next stranger who wanders in with the entirety of your broken, bad, tender, open, unsuspecting heart.  

1. a playlist with songs that represent each section in some way. the inclusion of this playlist was inspired by my dear friend Charlotte’s Insecure Tea playlists.