Birthdays.

         I wasn't too keen on my birthday this year. You can only figure out that you don't like your birthday when it's in close proximity to actually happening, because it doesn't come around that often. This was my year to be one of those people that absurdly "doesn't like" their birthday. In the weeks leading up to it, people would ask me if I was excited to be 18, when in reality I was indifferent about it. I kept mentally preparing myself to gloss over it and treat it as if it was nothing.
           Ironically, 18 is kind of a big birthday. I mean, you become a legal adult, this only happens once in a persons life. An entirely different world is being opened up to me; I'm an independent being. I just wasn't ready for my birthday this year. I'm a little more than a month into college, finally becoming comfortable with everything, and I just felt that I didn't need a reason to reevaluate my life when I do it so often anyway. I didn't want to think about my old friends and my new friends and my past successes and my future ones. I'm not depressed and I'm not happy, so I didn't really know how to go about celebrating this. It made a lot of bad things whirl through my mind. Like how some of my best friends were away at school and wouldn't be here to celebrate, and how I feel as though I haven't accomplished anything I wanted to by this time in my life. It's a day that's supposed to build you up, and it just started making me feel bad about myself. It made me want to beat myself up for not "doing enough". Maybe I felt like I didn't deserve to be celebrated, like I'm being praised for doing "nothing"(I'm good at making myself feel like I accomplish very little.Bad tendency.) Sometimes I get extreme with hating everything conventional, and felt like having people say nice things to me and tell me they love me just because it's the day I was born is stupid when they can say it to me without particular reason any time of the year.
           At first I felt like a complete ass because I thought that I had become overly jaded and expectant of birthdays to be magical and perfect, but today actually made me realize that I don't need monumental things to happen to have a good day. It got me to remember what is truly important to me, and it got me back to feeling like myself again, after a couple of weeks of first feeling conflicted and then emotionless.
           In the end, I took advantage of my birthday as a day to appreciate all of the good in my life. I can't think about what I don't have, or what I want, or who doesn't like me, or the things that I do wrong.  I have to stop thinking about the things that I don't even care about, but feel like I'm supposed to care about. Thinking about these things does nothing for me. Whatever I dream of having in my life is meant to be there somehow, and I just have to take comfort in the fact that I know I will continue to fight and work for what I want until I get there. I have a lot of people who care about me in my life, who showed me that they care about me, and I have to stop being such a dick sometimes and just allow people to love me. I have to allow me to love myself too. I've realized how much trouble I have just allowing myself and other people to give me credit and praise, I'm so bad at accepting that I'm not the worst human being on the planet. I'm not a horrible of lazy person. I'm a good person. I try all of the time. To help people, to do the right thing, to be a person I'm proud of; and all of these things aren't a waste of time, they make me the person that I am. I can't be afraid of "getting a big head" by allowing myself the human right of authentic and deserved love. I don't have to question and over-complicate things all of the time, when the things that I live for are genuine and simple. Today showed me that I'm making a positive impact on people. It's one of the only things I care about, and I just feel deep inside of me that it isn't a figment of my imagination. I don't always do or say the right thing, I'm not always the better person, I don't always appreciate what an incredible gift life is, and sometimes, I just want to give up; but I know that I'm a person who deserves to feel happy and important and special. I don't know if this year will be one of the best years of my life(And I'm not going to say it will be to motivate myself, because whenever I predict how my life is going to go..it never works out); but I know that it has the capability to be. As long as I keep trying, I can never be disappointed with myself.
           Let's see how 18 goes.