It's my birthday, and I'll have a complete emotional breakdown if I want to...

So, I’m 26 now. Funny how there is so much build-up in anticipation for your birthday and then you blink and it’s over. I am happy to report that I made it all the way to like 7pm yesterday before having a brief, yet all-encompassing emotional breakdown. I think it was my hangover that saved me for the majority of the day (first time I have ever been thankful for a hangover). I drank enough vodka the night before to kill off just the right number of brain cells so as to prohibit me from thinking too metacognitively. So that was nice.

But of course, the inevitable happened. There I was on the shores of Sullivan’s Island, staring out at the horizon, all the while shrinking into the expanse of blue and wondering WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN!?!?!?! I should have known to avoid the beach; how are you not supposed to become burdened under the pressure of existentialism in a place where you can LITERALLY stare out onto the never-ending horizon? Ugh.

I don’t know, y’all. It’s just fucking insane. Life is so complicated. Remember when I said this blog offered nothing new or revolutionary? Just want to make sure everyone sees that I’m making good on that promise. Like any good millennial, I am going to use a meme to represent the complex feelings I have in my head right now:

The overarching theme that has come out of this weekend is one that my therapist and I have discussed often: expectations vs. reality. Or, again, in millennial language:

One of the first things I found myself thinking during my birthday breakdown was the age old: “My life is nothing like I thought it would be!” If my therapist had a dollar for every time I said that she wouldn’t have to be my therapist. She’d be living in one of those half-a-million-dollar beach homes that I stood in front of last night, looking out her window and wondering why there was a man dressed like a middle-aged lesbian sobbing on the beach.

What I don’t think many people know about me is that I am not a naturally optimistic or hopeful person. In fact, I am quite the opposite. A big part of why I started therapy three years ago was that the added layer of chronic pain in life made it almost impossible for me to feel hopeful or optimistic about anything. Most of the people I know or work with always comment on the fact that I have such a positive attitude and an optimistic outlook despite my pain and difficulties, but what they don’t realize is how much effort (and medication) it takes to maintain that outlook.

I’m a glass half empty kinda guy. I sort of always have been. In exploring that in therapy, it really boils down to the belief systems I built as a young, closeted kid with a genetic predisposition for anxiety/depression growing up in the Catholic Church that lead me to believe I didn’t deserve good things in my life. I know, I know a young closeted Catholic kid having issues with self-worth. WHAT!?!!? Revolutionary! Unheard of! But more on all that in another blog. All that to say that my natural disposition in life is one of, “What’s missing? What don’t I have? Why haven’t I done everything I thought I’d ever do in x number of years? Why am I not an international supermodel?”

Of course, this is an unhealthy way of thinking, and it’s one we have worked long and hard on in therapy. While I still have a great deal of work by way of shifting my perspective, I have at least gotten myself to a place where I can recognize and question my own thought process. My therapist assures me this is a big step and I should be proud of that. I’m skeptical. But alas. For me, it feels most useful to expose what I’m saying to myself as something laughably unreal. For example:

One time, after many weeks of, “I just never thought this would be my life, this isn’t what I expected!” My therapist pushed me to explain what it was that I did actually expect from my life at this point. A bit taken aback, I thought, and immediately started stuttering because for the first time, I started to realize how silly my expectations for my life were. In reality I had no clear expectations. I couldn’t give career milestones or personal goals I had hoped to meet. If I did start listing those things, I realized that I would have already accomplished many of them. Embarrassed, I explained it thusly, saying, “Look, in my head I just have this vision of a life where it is always like 50-75 degrees outside, where I am always wearing a great fitting cable-knit sweater. And in this life, I always just feel really cozy, and I never sweat, and I never get an upset stomach or have to take a dump, or anything like that…”

My therapist is an objective professional, but that day she told me I sounded like an idiot. Because I did. I know it sounds crazy, but ultimately the point of this story (HA! As if there’s a point other than catharsis. LOL) is that the expectation I had in my head of life was a complete and utter fantasy. Duh, I know. While this is an extreme example, it applies in so many spaces and so many ways. Not all of my expectations are complete and utter fantasy, but the crazy realization is that no matter how nonsensical, I allow these expectations to inform my perspective on my reality. And what’s more is the realization that when I did state concrete expectations I had for myself regarding career, finances, personal life, etc. they were all expectations I had either met or, in some cases, exceeded.

Expectations are tricky. As human beings we want to strive, right? We want to imagine, we want to goal-set, and we want to plan. We want to gauge our progress in life and understand whether or not we are doing things correctly or not. And so in a way, expectations are healthy and necessary. The problem lies in the way we formulate these expectations and the power that we give them. When we give expectations too much leverage on our lives, they become limiting, suffocating, and dangerous. They become a springboard for us to view all the ways in which our lives don’t match up to an idea.

And how are these expectations formed? My picture of a “perfect” life is like something out of a movie. No one ever poops or pees in a movie, have you ever noticed that? Not unless it’s related to comedy. Movies remove the basic human function of shitting and pissing all to create a cleaner, more idealized life. Hence my dream world with no need for bathrooms. Again, slightly absurd and abstract, but the principle remains. Culture informs expectations. Our parents, the ads we see on TV, our friends, etc. All of these things provide a baseline for expectations. When we let the messages our culture sends go uncheck, that’s when we end up sobbing on the beach on our 26th birthday because we’re not [blank] enough or we haven’t been to [blank] yet and because we broke up with [blank] and what were we thinking? We look at our friends FaceBook feeds and wonder why we aren't having as much fun or why we aren't married yet or why we don't love our job as much.

Exhausting, I know. All of these things go on in my head on a daily basis. The goal and the hope is to make healthy goals, to strive for attainable and realistic things, to dream big, but not to wrap the entirety of my self-worth into my hopes and aspirations. My hope is, and always has been, to settle into my reality. To see it and appreciate it for what it is. Gratitude is so powerful, but also really difficult when you have anxiety/depression and have created an almost involuntary lean towards the negative. It takes work to look at the positive, and even moreso to believe that you deserve the positive things you see. It’s such a simple concept, but one that when put into action makes so much sense, you know?

So, I am setting aside time this weekend to think about everything that I do have in my life and all the things I have been able to accomplish in 26 years on this earth. I may have yet to visit another country or deadlift 300lbs, but I have a master’s degree and a set of incredible friends that span the globe. The reality is, my reality is pretty great. My anxiety often tries to tell me otherwise, but that’s why God made Valium. It’s a hell of a drug.

Anyway, thanks for listening (is it listening if you’re reading it in your head?).