31.

I did something this year that I haven’t done in a long time, and perhaps never actually given myself permission to. Celebrate my birthday with people. Ever since I moved out from my parents’ home at 16, birthdays were always a quiet lonely affair. I hated the attention, and hated being singled out for anything.

Perhaps the biggest thing I am leaning into this year is the courage to love myself first, and allowing myself to receive love from others. In a session with my therapist a few weeks ago, I realized that I didn’t give myself permission to receive love not because I didn’t want it, as I described to people, but because I did not think I deserved it. But the truth of the matter is that I have drawn solace in the isolation to temper against the fear and anxiety of not receiving the right kind of love from people, or to loose a love because I did not have the capacity to wholeheartedly engage with the process of loving hard. 

I have used my trauma as an excuse for my complicated nature of pushing people away, but we all have our skeletons. People by nature are complicated. There will be people around me that can manage my complicated and I have to give them permission to try. Perhaps that is my hope and wish for the next year. To allow myself to receive love as I want it, and find my safe spaces with people as much as I have been for others. I can’t hide behind the veneer of hyper independence forever. Humans are social creatures and I was not made to be alone, and perhaps the lesson is to be less afraid of doing life in togetherness.

So as I write this after returning from a tender trip through beautiful British Columbia (I feel perhaps I have entered my Eat, Pray, Love era), I am cradled with the courage that thirty-one will be a year to remember.