Waking up with a heavy heart on my birthday the 1st of October is something I remember as "normal'".
Am I the Only one who feels crappy on this supposedly special day?
Why don't I feel ecstatic, excited, happy?
What is this heaviness, grief and sadness that wash over me every time around this time of the year?
It almost feels like I'm dreading something to happen, I am dreading this moment of birth I experienced 26 years ago. The day I slipped into the visible from the invisible realm to do this all over again..
Oh this birthday week... The most love filled & the most challenging week of my year. A week where the demons that live inside of me decide to throw a party I always tend to find out about last minute.
My thoughts start to spiral in my head giving rise to anxiety or collapsing internal world where my inner turns against me. I feel I have less immunity against my self-destructive tendencies. My inner critic gets a superpower that my light side of my psyche struggles to fight.
All other days are easier but this week... it's like my immunity against my very own dark drops and I bump into thoughts of " why did i come here? Why did I choose this all over again? What did I agree to that i can't remember, god damn this physical realm!" I feel weird in my body, I feel weird having a body, I feel like I can just manage to detach and see this as a dream. It drives my head in, its eats my energy. It breaks my very own heart and scares me to my bones.
Who can I talk to, who would understand this messed up train of thought of mine.. In silence I keep myself in my looping thoughts of unreasonable doubt and utter sadness about life itself.
I wonder how would it be to not be born, how would the world be if i wasn't here.. Will i go back home when i die?
I look back upon my year and count the countless successes, achievements, growths and transformations I went through and still I get to the point of questioning the deeper meaning to life itself.
4 years ago my birthday crisis lasted 2 months, while I was with a badly injured ankle limping through the rainforest to my tree house in India. 3 years ago it lasted a month when I was returning from Hawaii only to stop in New York going through a relapse of my addictive behaviours, self-harm a toxic relationship and the coldness of the big city society. 2 years ago it lasted 2 weeks where my heart skipped a beat to a man who was not my husband and this year it was 4 days where I dipped into an existential questioning of why I chose to come to a world of heart-break, separation, violence, indifference...
Then this ripped out page from a book was gifted to me by a very special friend on the day of my birthday celebration while we were preparing bowls of hummus and laying out platters for the 25 guests about to come to our home..
"as her love grew, her ability to feel the unseen and listen to the wisdom of the eternal strengthened. the walk on the path to freedom had changed her; though she still experienced times of difficult release, the feeling of unity remained ever present in her body. now that she lived her life in the grassy field between mortality and the infinite, she could feel that the space in her heart was the same as the heart of the earth and the heart of the universe."
This melted my doubt and reminded me of the crucial missing piece in my personal story.
I landed once again feeling home in my life, in my body in my mind. Feeling happy, feeling seen, feeling understood in the depths of my being.
What do you get out of this poem for yourself? Do you experience a birthday crisis of any kind? How is your experience of this special day of coming to life?