Winterborn(e)

Every winter there's one tradition I can't shake: I turn another year older, complete one more rotation around the sun.

February is not a kind month- the kindest thing about it is probably just that it's shorter than the others. I was born on the 9th, a day when a snowstorm always seems to be around the corner. This happenstance has always seemed a cruel irony to me: I hate winter- to be born in the dead middle of it is like a bad joke (and I'm not laughing). Over time, though, I've come to see it at least as a kind of marker- I've made it halfway across the dismal stretch of cold after the holidays’ end.

I'm not one for big parties nor am I one of those people who tells everyone around me when my birthday is coming up (ew), but all the same, I can't completely ignore it either. There's something about the regular recurrence of my day of birth that demands at least some private measure of recognition to me.

A birthday is like one's own personal new year, and because it happens in the blank space of a world in hibernation for me, I've come to treat it as such. Like my private holiday. If possible, I take the day off, an observance of one. I started doing this in college, which a lot of my friends found funny or baffling when the next day, they found out I'd skipped classes, not in favor of better plans, but to just...exist and do 'nothing'.

It's the perfect time of year for a reset- and while others are breaking their New Year's resolutions, I'm just beginning to make my own. I love New Year's Eve, but it comes at the end of such a busy time that I always find myself struggling for space to sit and reflect. That’s what I like to use my birthday for- expressing vague hopes and exacting plans alike for where I want to go from here- what one year older has in store for me, or what I hope it does. Writing this stuff down is both an unburdening of sorts and a manifestation, an investment. I do this in the form of a letter to my future self. I used to journal a lot when I was younger and though I don't do it these days, this is sort of a vestige of that.

Along with plans and goals, I like to write about my favorite memories, and whatever minor details I want about the current moment- what the weather is doing, what I'm wearing, what I've been watching and reading over the past year, the stuff I've enjoyed, and the things I want to try. I let my pen go wherever my mind wanders, thinking back over the last twelve months. When I'm finished, I fold however many pages I've got up and stick them in an envelope like I'm about to mail them. On the back of the envelope, I put down my own name along with instructions: do not open until 2/9/(insert year). Then I put the letter in a shoebox in my closet on top of a pile of all my past letters from the years before. Throughout the year, I tend to forget everything I wrote down, and when I read it again a year later I genuinely find myself excited as though I hadn't written it myself.

Obviously, life happens, but I try to keep this date sacred for myself as often as possible, to find time to settle down and read the notes from the year before before continuing the correspondence with my past self. In the heart of heartless winter, this is a gift I give and receive, a love letter from me to me. So even if the rest of the day does suck, I have something to look forward to on my birthday, something to soften the downpour of anxiety that comes more often than not now from getting another year older and achier. I like to think that all the letters from all the years put together could make a book of sorts, chronicling not just the big things, the dreams unfolding, but the smaller, everyday things I would have forgotten entirely if I hadn't taken up my pen, consecrated it in words.

And as for that winter storm warning that may or may not be in effect: I normally hate the snow- shoveling it, having it cancel my plans or make my commute a white-knuckle ordeal, the way it sticks around on the side of the road getting dirty for weeks after it falls. But on my birthday, I mind less. I can even admit it’s kind of pretty. It feels like a stroke of luck, like a christening of sorts to have it fall fresh white outside as I write within, carpeting the world and painting it brand new.