Fast facts (if you don’t have time to read the full post): We are approaching chemo number nine this week! I have a follow up appointment at the dermatologist office Wednesday to check up on my chemo rashes. They are doing a lot better, but I do not recommend putting steroid cream on without gloves. My fingers are peeling SO bad. Today is also my last day as a 29 year old. Tomorrow I enter my 30’s. Lit.

TO THE LONG VERSION!

I was born on Sunday, June 7 in 1992 at 5:56 am. According to my star charts, I am a Gemini (duh) with a Virgo moon and Gemini rising. I have several houses in Gemini. If you’re into zodiac signs, I am as pure as they come for my sign. In a few short hours, I will turn 30. Entering my 30’s isn’t scary for me. I feel like I am one of the last in my friend group to enter them. Everyone is already pretty comfortable in their 30’s while mine is staring me down, wondering what I will do with my time here. Hell if I know. I am just grateful I made it this far.

I had this weird fear that I would die before I turned 21. I don’t know why. It might have been because one of my cousins passed away around that age or maybe it was my weird depression or maybe even a mix of both. But the clock still struck midnight and I celebrated my 21st birthday wondering if a bar would accept my vertical license if I went out. Now I am staring down death in a different way. It isn’t a figment of my imagination or irrational fear. Death exists in my right boob. And lymph nodes. And spine, probably. I am simultaneously dying while fighting for my life. I straddle two very unique worlds. Celebrating a birthday in the midst of this chaos is… strange.

It sounds like a cliche, but a birthday feels different with cancer, especially one that is such a milestone. It is bittersweet, emotional, and in a weird way also insignificant in the grand scheme of things. I’ve transitioned from celebrating the earth’s rotation around the sun to celebrating the sun’s rotation around the earth. I made it another 24 hours today. I survived another minute. Sometimes with cancer all you can handle is a minute or two at a time. Sometimes it is only a few seconds. I celebrate every chemo, every successful blood draw, every lap around the snack bar at the cancer center because not everyone with cancer gets to live to see and be in those moments. I am grateful to be alive, but have guilt of being here when so many do not. Existing every day is a fucking gift, though some days it feels like a punishment.

I’ve spent the day privately archiving my 20’s in my head. I’ve endured and achieved more than I ever could have asked of myself. The most important lesson I have learned that I can think of right now is you are basically an idiot until you are 27. Or at least I felt like I was. And then things start to make a bit more sense, have a bit more wisdom to them. Even approaching 30, I know I will update this thought in a couple of years. Maybe I am still an idiot. Who’s to say? Life doesn’t come with a guidebook and even if it did, I probably wouldn’t read it.

I appreciate my 20’s for the amount of self discovery I was afforded. I found myself in the corners of parties at 3 am and in the selfies with friends dripping in sunshine. I am shaped by the tears I cried during my deepest depressions and the laughter shared over countless meals with loved ones. I became resilient. I learned to love myself (most of the time). I lost a lot in every sense you can lose anything, but I gained a lot more. And then I also got cancer, so that was a fun plot twist. What better way to end a fucking rad decade with something so unfathomable you would have thought I was lying when I told you when I first found out.

The beginning of my 20’s and the beginning of my 30’s will have this in common though: you do not know what is to come. Anything can happen. You may have inklings, you may have plans, and all of that can get thrown out of the window at any point. The only way out is to go through.

So I cheers to my 20’s and I cheers to my 30’s with my alcohol free drink (because my liver numbers are too high for me to enjoy rum currently.) May I live to see another day, and if I am lucky enough, another year. Fuck me up, fam.

Today’s song lyrics of the day are brought to you by Mark Ronson.

“Swift, in a blur, man, the world done changed on us
(Woo) Oh, quick, what’s a five letter word for it?
Ain’t that a… ain’t that a bitch?
And what’s the point when it feel like it don’t matter?
It don’t matter, but it’s a lot of talk, it’s all chatter like”

– Truth (feat. Alicia Keys & The Last Artful, Dodgr), Mark Ronson, Alicia Keys, The Last Artful, Dodgr