I’m Still Here—and That’s Kinda Cool

I've always been weirded out by my birthday.
The thought of people surrounding you with cake in one of their hands singing you a happy birthday.
Not that I don't appreciate the gesture, I do. Only God knows how much!
But I just have no idea what to do and what to say.

Maybe that is because I don't enjoy life as much as I'm supposed to.

While grammatically correct, using the present tense here doesn’t emotionally hold its value anymore.
Funny how things have changed.

If somehow time travel was invented and someone handed me an opportunity to use it to go back and have a talk with my younger self, I would have told him life would, indeed, get better.

Not getting better in the sense of finding a purpose, happiness, or joy in life.
If I had expected that, I'd be setting myself up for a huge failure.

But it’s a quiet sense of accomplishment, a proof that things have moved, even if just slightly.
Life is now much more enjoyable than it was years ago.
There is something I can look forward to every day, such as the ending of the book I'm reading, the next book on my TBR (to-be-read), where my cats will go sleep in the house, or how and what the football club I've been supporting for the last 20 something years will do to disappoint me.

I admit I don't make much of good decisions. There are some I regret and for obvious reasons, there are some really good ones as well.

What happened, happened—and maybe that’s exactly how it was meant to be.

Happy Birthday, Matt.