Chasing la dolce vita — Some thoughts on a birthday I didn't ask for

 

Birthdays have never meant much to me. I mean that sincerely, without performance. But the world around you has other ideas — people who love you, or simply people who insist, conspire to make the day feel significant whether you invited that significance or not.

My resistance isn't rooted in melancholy. There is no quiet sadness underneath it, no wound dressed up as indifference. It comes from somewhere more philosophical — a place I keep returning to, especially on days like this. Because no matter how hard we try, none of us can fully explain why we are here.

We live, mostly, for the sake of living. And in that circularity, a strange question surfaces: do our loves and losses, our emotions, our hatred, our wealth or poverty, our youth and the slow erosion of it — does any of it finally matter, if we are all, without exception, born to wither and disappear?

But even within that madness, there should be a method. That is what I keep looking for.

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On the family side, I carry a particular regret — soft but persistent, like a stone in a shoe you've learned to walk with.

My mother was not complicated, but different. In the way that people are when the world they live in doesn't quite have the vocabulary for who they are. She existed within a specific social and economic world, and she both belonged to it and quietly chafed against it. What I remember most clearly is that she wanted things — not grand things, but vivid ones. She wanted me to travel, to see the world, to experiment with life. And she had her own dream: London. She spoke of it with a particular light. I remember that light.

When I finally reached a point where I could have taken her — when London became not just possible but easy — she was gone. The years before her going were years of illness and suffering, slow and unkind, the way illness often is. And so that trip, that small and entirely achievable thing, never happened.

I think about it on days like this.

I am, technically and legally, a single person — which means the only family I am responsible for is my sister. She has her own struggles, her own shifting horizons. She wants to visit Switzerland. I don't know when I can make it happen; her health is not infinite, and neither is time. But I want to do it. I want to do it the way I wanted to take my mother to London — before the window quietly closes.

These are not epic failures. They are small, mundane, human ones. The kind that don't make it into eulogies but sit with you in the ordinary hours. I don't wish to change the family I was born into — I wouldn't, even if I could, and I say that with full awareness of everything it contains.

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Somewhere in the middle of trying to make sense of what life is for, I stumbled upon a reason to live with some energy.

It is my small entrepreneurial venture. Modest in scale, stubborn in spirit. It keeps me going — and more than that, it nourishes a small group of people who are, I have come to realise, a genuinely strange lot. They are not hungry for money. They don't seem to harbour the grinding ambition or appetite for accumulation that the world insists is normal. They appear, against all reasonable expectations, to be happy.

I found them odd at first. Now I find them quietly remarkable.

So here is one purpose I have arrived at, honestly and without grandeur: if I can take care of them — in the thoroughly selfish pursuit of taking care of myself — then something in this life has been worthwhile. One small, functional reason to keep going. That is enough.

And then there are the people who arrived — not through strategy or careful curation, but organically as well as through effort, the way the best things tend to. Friends, well-wishers, seniors, conflicted lovers, quiet admirers whose affection I never quite feel I've earned. I chose them, yes, but the choosing felt less like a decision and more like recognition — the way you recognise a song you've never heard before but somehow already know.

I have had to work hard for most things in life. Harder than most, if I am being honest — the kind of hard work that the world sometimes looks at and calls a pyrrhic victory, quietly wondering whether the cost was worth the prize. Perhaps. But if that is the tax I pay for almost everything else, then in the matter of friendship and warmth and being genuinely seen by a handful of people, I think I am ahead. I should not complain. I won't.

There is one more thing — something I have never quite resolved, only learned to live with. Some of us are constitutionally incapable of wearing our emotions on the outside. We don't reach for vulnerability easily. We would rather hold ourselves together in public, present the composed face, and keep the trembling interior private. It makes things harder, sometimes — connections that might have deepened don't, because the door stays half-closed. But there is something in it too, something that feels like self-respect. A kind of dignity in not asking the world to carry what you can carry yourself.

Difficult, yes. But dignified. And on balance, I think I would choose it again.

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And so the thoughts multiply, as they always do on a birthday I keep insisting doesn't matter.

But here it is anyway — this day, this existence, this particular arrival into the world on a particular date that someone, somewhere, will insist on marking. How do you hide from that? You can't, entirely. You shouldn't, perhaps.

What I know is this: love, companionship, lust, romanticism, energy, kindness — none of it arrives in the right proportions. None of it stays. We cannot change how we look, how we are perceived, whether the person we are trying to reach actually sees us. We can adjust very little of what we fundamentally are. But we can try. We can keep trying — to make sense of this world and ourselves, or to make peace with the fact that no such sense may exist.

Both are valid. Both take courage.

I don't know what I want for the next birthday, or the one ten years from now. But if I am allowed a quiet wish — not a list, just a leaning — it is this: an unhurried life. Some wealth, not the kind that announces itself, but the kind that simply removes the sharper edges of worry. Some peace. And fewer regrets of the particular sort that come not from what you did, but from what you held back from — the passion you didn't follow far enough, the moment you almost chose.

Concretely, if life is feeling generous: a trip, alone or with someone worth the silence. A body that makes one last glorious case for itself before the twilight settles in. A soul to carry forward into whatever comes next. A kitchen that smells of good recipes and unhurried mornings. A house that is genuinely mine. A mountain, perhaps — or simply a rain-washed day of such melancholic beauty that it asks nothing of you except to be present in it.

That would be enough. That would be more than enough.

Happy birthday to me, then — reluctantly, philosophically, and with a full heart. May I live less with imposter syndrome.