That time of year

I misspoke last year. It isn’t that I wish I had never been born. It’s a matter of not having worked much on the task at hand. My birthday is a reminder of my wasted potential, a lifetime of getting it wrong.

Some people reflect at New Year’s. I reflect on my birthday.

Every year, I take stock, and I continue to see a chaotic life, a disorganized existence. I don’t accomplish anything. I serve no purpose, not really.

I wish for excellence, but I lack the intelligence, initiative, focus, and drive to achieve it. My tendency is to claim failure, but it’s less than that—a chronic lack of personal momentum prevents progress, so just as there is no room to succeed, there is no room to fail.

I want to be different. I want to be vibrant and smart, dynamic and disciplined. Instead, I’m just exhausted most of the time, and certainly too foggy to do even things on a mediocre level. Significant achievements are beyond me. And I'm really, really fat.

Achievement. We honor achievement. This culture honors goals, accomplishments, completed to-do lists, the stairs that head up. There is no honor in being the slow-moving, unremarkable being with the jumbled thoughts who plods through each day. This makes me invisible.

I don’t have the energy or mental capacity to live as if it mattered. It doesn’t matter. Nothing would change in the world if I weren’t here or even if I had never been here. I haven’t saved anyone’s life or invented anything, made any important discoveries, changed the course of history, or even changed the course of someone else’s life. I am one mundane nobody among billions of other nobodies, and I should be OK with that.

May 5 shows up on the calendar every year, just as it has for the past 49. Nothing noteworthy comes from me in the 365 days in between. I don’t make anything happen. I wouldn’t know where to start.

This is my birthday problem. I’m forced to look back, and what I see in my own wake is a very extensive trail of lost relationships, missed opportunities, confusion, embarrassment (a lot of embarrassment), stupidity, awkward encounters, misunderstandings, getting it wrong again and again, lack of planning, irresponsibility, absence of initiative, failure to lose weight, and an inability to love or be worth loving.

The last ten years have been the most difficult of the nearly 50 I have spent on Earth. For the past decade, I expected each year to be an improvement upon the last, assuming it just had to be, especially if I worked hard enough to make it happen. This idea has only led me to a life of frustration and disappointment.

Although I sincerely appreciate what I have—enough to eat, a place to live, a husband, and a job—I cannot shake the feeling that my illnesses, my sadness, my inherent unlovability are all the result of my own poor choices and laziness.

I wanted to create a special life for myself, but instead, I have allowed my life to rattle along without much steering. I’ve ended up in this place of resentment, this place of frustration and sadness, this place of knowing that special was never actually an option. I didn’t do the right things, I didn’t plan or organize.

I didn’t work hard enough to have a life that lived up to my potential. May 5 only serves to remind me that another year has come and gone, but I am still exactly the same.