not the happiest birthday

It pretty much sucked to have a birthday abroad. I was trying to be more diplomatic than that because I like my friends here and ended up having a lot of fun at the folklorico show but basically that’s how I feel and I want to own it.

It was not because having class all day was rough. In some ways that helped take my mind off of my general dissatisfaction with having my bday abroad and was beneficial. It was not because we didn’t adequately celebrate; I didn’t contribute any good ideas to planning for my birthday and the show was as good as anything I would have come up with, to put it in the most negative framing possible. It wasn’t exclusively because I felt sad about not being home to share it with my friends and family for I had many ambivalent feelings about being away for six months, some of which do not look very favorably upon my life at Tufts. And it really wasn’t because of some birthday-related existential crisis that I think happens to everyone almost every year.

I will confess that I cried a little on my birthday. I almost never cry – except when I choke up while reading or during a movie, but hardly even when instigated by my own life or my own feelings – but I couldn’t help getting emotional while I walked home from UCA to meet David before going out. I think I always find birthdays disappointing – there are always a couple of people who I wish had called to send their love, for example, and I always feel uncomfortable about the way in which a birthday gives one license to call inordinate amounts of attention to oneself – but this was different: this was a conscious understanding that, on the day I most want the people I love to reach out to me, the interactions we could have were guaranteed to be disappointing. In that way, it was a very pointed reminder of how I truly know no one in this city, how I could go through a whole birthday and should not expect any calls or texts, and struck me with a profound sense of isolation. When compounded with some other feelings addressed above, it stung.

I don’t mean to sound melancholy or pathetic or anything of the sort. I received some fantastic emails and facebook messages from friends from home (Andrew Helms, you clearly take the cake on that one) and had what ended up being a good night out with interested and caring friends… but, for the first time since arriving here, I felt legitimately and profoundly homesick. It put a damper on what ought to have been a happier day. And in the interest of being honest, that's the truth about my 21st.