It's All About Me

My birthday is coming up in a few days' time. This is a very big deal for me. I usually begin thinking about it in November, planning it throughout December, and anticipating it - loudly, repetitively, obsessively, and with unbridled glee - throughout January. January is the month of misery for nearly everyone, satiated by their Xmas excess, penniless, miserable in the British weather, bowed by the commute and the grey inevitability of work, temporarily obliterated by Xmas lights, gifts, and arguments over how to achieve the perfect roast potato. Ah but the joy of being empowered to think about such mundane things as a potato. In January I glow like a neon lightbulb. I have Birthday to look forward to. It always has several components and runs over several days. It always includes a trip to a spa, drinks with girlfriends, dinner with Husband, a long walk somewhere rugged or edgy, some frivolous shopping, a fab skyline, a bout of family encounters, and presents. Not just presents from other people to me, but presents from me to me. I pick something quirky and special and something reflective of my mood. This year it will almost certainly be the silver (not plated - the genuine article) earrings, featuring gilded cages with a monkey inside them. They are less heinous than they sound, principally because they are tiny and beautifully made, and when I wear them I know people will be squinting at them trying to determine, as covertly as they can, what they are (is that a MAN inside it? A bird? or what?) My birthday sounds like a week of egocentric me-celebration, founded on commercialism, doesn't it? It isn''t. It is a week to which I devote a period of reflection. A thinking process about the year that has passed: what sort of person was I? What challenges did I face? Which of them hit me completely unawares? What were the highs, the lows? What did I learn? And a period of meditation about the year to come. What do I know that it will hold for me? What do I want to be, how do I want to grow? I process these thoughts during my walks through edgy parts of town or up to the top of Primrose Hill,I let them drift through my head while prone on a table having my head massaged, I consider my challenges while staring at myself in a pink tutu in the changing room of a frippery boutique for Ladies Who Lunch (actually I have no intention of squeezing myself into a tutu, especially not a pink one, but I will do a lot of presentational trying-on of clothes destined for someone very differently shaped/aged from me, and I will really enjoy having the time and inclination to do it). My last year has been so tough. So, so challenging. My first year as the eldest child my first year coming to terms with life without my elder sister. And let's not kid ourselves that I'm over it either. I wonder in fact, if I will ever be over it. I have in fact moved on to a new stage in my life, one where my relationships with my parents, my younger sister, my niece and nephew, are all shifting inexorably. With huge positive outcomes too, but also with sadness. I may have the loveliest relationship with my niece, but let's not kid ourselves that if I were offered the opportunity to trade it in for 5 minutes with my elder sister, just five - I would relinquish it in a heartbeat. And then I'd donate those five minutes to my niece, for a chance for her to tell her Mother how amazing a time she is having at university, for my sister to register her joy at my niece's success in getting there at such a hard time. That same year has also been a year of family joy too, in the achievements and milestones of my own kids. It was the year my husband grew a beard,weathered the derision, and emerged looking remarkably sleek. And the year I made a profound and exciting leap in my career. In this next week I am looking forward to thinking about how my career change has rocketed my confidence. How my hair, now twice as long as it was 18 months ago (my version of my Husband's beard...) has changed the way I choose my clothes. How there might be something behind my persistence in repainting my toenails purple (my elder sister's favourite colour). I'll torture myself a bit over the instances when I've blown it and been horribly rude to car repairmen, hapless teachers and oblivious drivers, and I will hug myself for the random times I have smiled at a depressed commuter, given someone directions, restored a lost and wailing child to her Mum in a huge supermarket, called someone and told them I found their cat dead in my garden and took it to a vet, turned in a wallet full of cash and cards, dropped in the street, to the Police. Like everyone, I have potential for good things. And potential for meanness, petty mindedness, wandering introspection and superfluity.I am as likely to self flagellate over things I should or shouldn't have done, as I am to celebrate things I did, or didn't do. This year I will aim for new reasons to wake up each day with excitement, and at the same time I will think about blowing off at my fellow humans just a bit less than last year. However much of what I work through actually gets delivered remains to be tested, not least by those challenges in life that you have no idea are out there. But that week I'm going to take to deliberate over them? That will be, as it is every year, my priceless, personal experience, my annual Me Week, just one week out of 52 that I devote to my personal MOT. Bring it on.