27. on birthdays

trust as the remedy for age-related anxiety

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Some people look forward to their birthdays, but for most of my life I have not been one of them. Even though I relish nothing more than celebrating my many loved ones upon their solar returns, when it comes to my own, no matter where I’ve been, who I’ve been with or how I’ve decided to spend it, the familiar seeds of an anxiety-ridden heaviness usually start sprouting in my chest as the day draws nearer.

Individual birthdays, as we know them to be, are a relatively modern Western rite of temporality, closely tied to the evolution of the modern calendar system. They objectify conventionalised time as a central meaning maker for us people of the contemporary world. Like how calendars and watches mark time, each new rotation around the sun marks one more year of our existence on this Earth, but at the same time, they also strongly force the idea of time as a concept onto us. Our birthdays are often when we checklist our lives and take notes of where we are and what we feel is still missing, usually leaving us to drown in the lost sea of comparison instead of being able to value our unique journeys. Our nervous systems are paradoxically rigged to want certainty in an uncertain world. The daily news about our ever-collapsing planet only reinforces that time is running out. One of the most detrimental aspects of modernity and the monotheism it was conditioned by has been its substitution of the abundant cycles of life, birth, death, and rebirth with the harsh finality of linear time, where we are given only one life to supposedly ‘live’ correctly.

As mere mortals conditioned by this theory, we seem to go above and beyond to forget that we all share the same final destiny. Still, the realisation of the presence of the possibility of death started somewhat early for me. When I try to think back to when and why these feelings started, at their core, they feel inextricably linked to my primal wound, the death of my father, who passed away when I was eight and he was forty. His passing profoundly impacted my perception of life’s fragility, especially now that I’ve recently turned thirty-seven, surreally inching me ever closer to how old he was when he transcended this Earth. Even when it happened, I was acutely aware that he felt too young to die; I knew that we had all been robbed. Despite his age, he had lived a big life and was loved by many; his funeral at Gotokuji in Tokyo had the highest number of attendees ever recorded at the temple. Ever since his passing, the phrase “life is not promised” has been swirling around the sky of my subconscious like a banner in the wind, waving back and forth for as long as I can remember. At times, it’s acted as a powerful permission-giving admonition to embrace a strong Y.O.L.O. mindset and go for everything and live. Still, it’s often also been a giant clock weighing heavily around my neck, every tick reminding me that my time here is always running out. 

Time feels so slippery and big to talk about. It’s subjective and objective yet also physical, cultural and political. It’s expansive yet exposed in that it can be moulded by other powerful forces like capitalism that govern our lives, transforming everything, both living and non, into a saleable commodity. The way the ageing process has become so defined and exploited by capital has made time itself particularly hard on girls and women. From early on in our lives, we are forced to believe that we are never quite the ‘right’ age. When I was younger, desperate to be seen as grown, I lied about being older. Now that I am older, most of the time, when someone asks me how old I am, I am still tempted to tell them I’m younger than I am. I usually tell the truth, but sometimes, the temptation to lie is too strong. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this age-related anxiety is a hangover from having worked and lived off an income generated by working as a model in the fashion and beauty industry, which have both played a big part in skewing our perspectives on ageing. Their business model has been based on creating an image that denigrates older women, making ageing out to be not only undesirable but even ugly and shameful, causing us to become fearful of it. 

The benefits that come with getting older are pretty much invisible in Eurocentric culture, where ageing is explicitly made out to be a loss with no gains. On a personal level, I don’t subscribe to the idea that only in our youth are we beautiful or worthy, but in my work life, I’ve been outright conditioned to hide my age. Even though I have been quietly trying to train in new modalities to explore new interests and ways to make a living that feels more aligned with who I am, that feeling that I must permanently conceal this part of myself has been hard to shake. Despite my recently reaching a place of a lot more trusting surrender when it comes to the prospect of having a child, my age-related anxiety feels inseparable from my fertility, that familiar low-level hum reminding me that I am on biological clock and it’s getting ‘late’. Still, conversations around this compassionate truth are usually exacerbated by another fear-based narrative insidiously spread by capitalism. One that assumes all women have a biological yearning to procreate, that often blames and shames women for either not being able to or actively choosing not to participate in the having and raising of children, as well as one that once again renders our bodies to mere vessels of production and continues to centre the monogamous heterosexual nuclear family above all. 

But on my birthday last Saturday, I realized the usual anxious dread had not appeared. These months of live-streamed abhorrent levels of decimation, destruction and violence, from the genocide in Palestine to the Congo and Sudan, reading the desperate words of the many Gazans who are being starved, bombed, and obliterated in the comments sections, begging to be allowed to live alongside watching the continual collapse of our ecosystem, have changed me forever. This year, instead of focusing on what socially conditioned milestones I have not hit yet, “life is not a promise” comes back into the frame of my mind to remind me not to take a single morning that I get to wake up to see another day for granted. This year, I spent my birthday in the mountains of Catalonia with beautiful people, surrounded by the most epic horizon with nothing but green peaks in sight. Hypnotised by the sunset merging with the clouds that made it look like the sky was on fire, I took a deep breath and just said, ‘Thank you’.

As humans, we long for our lives to have purpose and meaning, but as many of us continue to wake up to and attempt to grapple with the ways that living under capitalism, we are somehow unwillingly complicit in these violent webs of oppression towards other beings and our planet the world over,  this question of meaning and purpose feels more existential than ever. I believe we each came into this world with an assignment to be carried out in this lifetime. That assignment can be as simple or complex, but the most crucial aspect we choose to orient ourselves toward is finding a way to be of service. Dr. Wayne Dyer wrote that the mantra of the lower self is ‘I NEED MORE’, and the mantra of the higher self is ‘HOW DO I SERVE?’. One of the teachers who has played an essential part in my thinking, Margaret Wheatly, asks us, “In a world we cannot recognise, how do we find a way forward? In this world, we do not understand. How do we know what to do? When so little is comprehensible, what is meaningful work? What is genuine contribution?” If you’re reading this thinking, ‘I don’t know my purpose, I don’t know where to start :(’ I want to reiterate that the question itself is where the richness is; these questions and yearnings are our seeds to grow.

With each day, I find new crumbs to guide me. I have no idea where they will lead me, but even when I feel lost, I should return to remember that I am being divinely guided. Trust the process, they say, and I’ve always thought I knew what that meant, but now I see how I previously only understood this conceptually. These last few months have humbled me in many challenging but beautiful ways, showing me how I do not always know best and that the Divine has other plans for me, helping me feel this new sense of powerful embodied trust deep in my body. These days, when I flinch or panic about something not working out, I now receive a message deep within from the cells reminding me to believe, to trust, to trust and to trust again. All I yearn for now is to follow this guidance, to be in alignment with my soul and the Earth. Instead of trying to orient towards a feeling as fleeting as happiness, I need to move towards something sturdier yet more malleable. Even though time is passing and every new day renders me closer to death, I look at myself in the mirror and feel more beautiful both inside and out as I continue to become a more trusting version of myself.

My age-related anxiety is steadily pacified by a deepening sense of curiosity and humility that emerges from being able to see how much I am on a learning journey. I am still, currently in the darkness of the womb, in the process of gestation towards my evolution, slowly getting ready to come back out again. This phase of coming apart is not to be rushed because this is where the profound transformation happens. I must keep reminding myself that even though this journey sometimes feels like I’m going too slow, the more I heal myself, the more my healing creates ripple effects in the collective, which is valid for all of us because a better, more just world can only be born through us. What a wonderful thing to know that we can experience a kind of death-rebirth so many times within one lifetime, that we have no idea what’s actually in store for us and what brings us meaning changes as time goes on. 

These days, for the first time in my life, feeling the need for ample reinforcements, I’ve been turning to prayer. Alongside prayers for peace, I pray to my father, my ancestors bygone and the universe for the agility to move and dance with the turns, fluctuations and the many calamities that will no doubt continue to emerge for the rest of our lives. I pray to let myself allow the joy and beauty all around me to seep into every pore because, despite the destruction all around us by the wounded patriarchal system that has indoctrinated us, one that tells us that life is about suffering, healing our conditioning means leaning into the goodness that is here, that that is the remedy.

Moving forward, instead of judging myself based on my age, looks, or socially notable merits, I want to see myself through my spirit's intrinsic traits, big soft heart, and unceasing eternal quest as a student of love. We must somehow recover the long story of our souls and learn to see the long story in everyone we cross paths with.

Instead of using my birthday as a checklist for what I haven’t achieved, I will continue to try my very best to repurpose it as a moment to see that where I am now is exactly where I am supposed to be because life is not promised to us yet today, here I am alive and breathing, and that’s all that matters.