You made another year! Congratulations all things considered. I know it has been hard to get here, to be honest, you really weren’t expecting to be here were you? Daily suicidal thoughts, anxiety of a world that despises your skin that your peers don’t notice but you do, or just the randomness of existing and then not. But there you are: married, aging, consistently growing, and Black. How could I forget SO so nerdy?! Like, not as bad as when you were younger, but you were asked last weekend if you liked anime while wearing a Faye Valentine shirt and your response was 2 hours of murdering eardrums. So why not take a trip down memory lane?
We’ll skip past the Panama days, everyone knows how much you loved that time. Let’s start at 21 years ago, when you watched your first love walk past you in High School and thought “she’s hot and just perfect” only 10 minutes later for her to sit next to you and say hi. How’d you react? Immediate sweating and shyness, literal silence. But she saw something in you and a year later you were together for 2 years. You did your best to handle undiagnosed depression, anxiety, ptsd, and apparently adhd. You had to learn the hard way that your words once spoken can’t be taken back, so you spent years lost, lonely, and curious. At 20 joining the military because progress wasn’t possible at $7.25 an hour part time, becoming emotional twice while in basic training: once because you were so stressed with being around loudness 24/7 and the other because a captain came to speak to your flight telling you to imagine how proud your parents would be when you’re finished. The idea of that felt so foreign to you that it brought you to tears, not that your parents would be proud, but that you were doing something they would make them proud.
You moved to Maryland surrounded by Black people and realized there was still space for you in the community. All the feelings of inadequacy about your blackness falling off of you knowing that your voice was needed for their ears as well as their experiences being necessary for your growth. Between your first relationship to your (not really) next one really forced you to understand what it really meant to care about yourself and dealing with the pain of doing everything right and not being “chosen”. It brought clarity, but also the frustrations of letting go. Sometimes the most basic understanding of love isn’t enough, more words needed to be applied. A 4 month deployment to Africa changed how you saw capitalism and comsumerism, constantly asking yourself “how can I feel as fulfilled as these people that have nothing”? Germany awaited you afterwards.
Meeting your then gf, now wife at a bar and not thinking it would lead to a new friend and that’s it. Breaking up because your philosophy was to have no regrets with your decisions, only to realize that if your philosophy caused someone else that much pain it’s a trash philosophy and time to grow. Realizing your mistake when she still was your friend and supportive even if you weren’t together only noticing that someone was actually willing to love you because of you. That’s it, not what you offered them or because of how you looked (even though you looked great), it was because they loved you and loved being loved by you. Losing friends because you knew they didn’t trust you and you didn’t trust their ideals.
A lifetime spent feeling lonely and longing for something that you can’t explain and don’t know what it is. Marriage keeps you grounded, but the feeling persists. Yet here you are, still breathing and learning. Finally writing after your wife told you years ago to get to it, feeling the same feeling of freedom as you do on a dance floor. Graduated from nerd to Blerd, finding more connections online and being seen more than you ever have every year that passes. Being appreciated and cared about by many: Mandy, Janay, Patience, Badger, Kristin, Kayla (day one), Stephen (an inspiration). You’ve helped people who haven’t forgotten you have and you have memories of everyone you’ve met that made you get to now stronger and wiser. It’s only a matter of time before those who already see your light get to celebrate what you do for others spirit. You’re on your way to something greater than you and you can feel it in your jellies.
Happy birthday to you because who would’ve thought?
Something With Nothing 