29

I’m sitting here on the morning of my 29th birthday, my 6th birthday post transplant, wrapped in blankets watching the falling snow from my cozy chair. If you’ve been following me on social media, you know that this last week or so has been a challenging one filled with hospital admissions and now an upcoming surgery scheduled for the beginning of December. That’s a story for another time, but I will say the happenings of this last little bit coupled with the sentimentality that always accompanies birthdays around here has left me with a few thoughts.

(I also have to say how grateful I am for the tools I’ve learned, and the practices I’ve built during times of stability that I can now call on in the challenging times. The work of embodiment isn’t so that we never experience body chaos again but that we have a baseline to return to. I wasn’t perfectly calm and regulated the entire time but I was able to acknowledge the sense making in my dysregulation, more easily ask for support and provide myself with the tools to hold myself through this experience, which I will continue to do as this journey unfolds)

Birthdays carry a lot of emotion around here, especially with each year I “wasn’t supposed” to have. There is the knowledge that this body has carried so much life and death, and instead of celebrating another trip around the sun each birthday has turned more into a vigil of what we gained, and what we lost. Survival, I’ve learned, is sacred.

I had grand plans for my birthday this year, almost all of which got derailed when my body got loud and demanded immediate attention. Instead of the party I’d planned with my friends, I sat in ER rooms and felt the depths of body grief in a life that wasn’t unfolding how I’d planned. I rode the waves of trauma still present in my body and acknowledged the grief that existed in my body, and then something else rose to the surface too. The thing about deep body truths is they require deep presence.

Rather than shame my body (and let’s be honest, I did a fair amount of that too) I began asking myself how I could be with more of what was. Wholeness means all of it gets to belong.

So on the morning of my 29th birthday, I’ve discovered that while it may not be in the way I wanted, I am deeply present for my one wild and precious life. I get to witness my own unfurling, in all kinds of ways.

It’s not the birthday I’d hoped, but it is another year of this messy, wild life I wasn’t sure I’d get. I think presence is the gift I forgot to ask for. It’s tender, sometimes inconvenient, and utterly alive.

May I always stay alive to the wholeness of my life.