At 9:15 this morning I will (in the future tense, since I'm writing this at 7:45am) have completed 47 trips around the sun. Yes: I'm definitely a grey-muzzle. But how does one celebrate when so much of their life is not worth celebrating? Birthdays are about a person's life, in toto, and not cherry-picked. Or at least that's how I view it.

Since last October, almost a year now, I've been wrestling with a resurgence of the depression that took me years to fight last time. I'm not even sure if I ever really beat it, to be honest. Maybe it just fell into the background as an annoying hum that I didn't notice until late 2013, again. But my diet faltered, I have gained back all the weight I'd lost, and between work and my volunteer life in local fandom, I'm stretched as thin as thin can be. I feel like a rubber band about to break.

So what's worth celebrating? That I still exist? That's not celebratory in my mind. What about celebrating all the stuff I've created? That's a bit more realistic but, really, that's not something to celebrate on a birthday ... that's more an everyday kind of thing. What about me is really worth celebrating?

I'm not sure I have an answer but I'm going to celebrate anyway.

I'm going to go down to the Minnesota State Fair with my mother, my siblings, and their families. Not my first choice, true, but it's hard for me to know what I really want when my brain is so twisted around like this. I'm going to go and see if I can recapture the feeling of my youth when I would go to the Fair, eat mini-doughnuts and corn-dogs, play video games, and take in the latest crop art. (Yes, "crop art" is a thing; Google it.) I'm going to celebrate who I was when I really embraced the Fair as something that was integral to my life. That person was pretty cool (even though he once slammed 30+ ounces of Mountain Dew on a 97-degree day and got so violently ill that he couldn't stand to look at Mountain Dew for the next 20 years...)

I think I'll celebrate him and see if I can find the through-line that connects us.

Now I think I'm going to go out and buy some breakfast. A corned beef hash Eggs Benedict (with tons of hollandaise) is about the best breakfast you can have and, luckily, there's a place nearby that serves it.

I think I may be turning a corner with my depression; time will tell. I really am tired most of the time but hope that once I get some space and freedom to reassess my life (and come to grips with how busy I've been for the last year), I'll be able to return to more realistic levels of "me".

Yours,
Sylvan