This is my birthday week, and I am always excited and thankful to celebrate another year around the sun. As I get older, I have friends who dread their birthdays. They hate that they’re getting older. Some lament personal and professional choices they’ve made that have put them off the path they imagined themselves on at this stage in life. Others cannot do the physical activities they loved at the same levels and are feeling the effects of time. Some feel like their brain and bodies are betraying them each birthday and reminding them just how much older they are turning.
I choose not to think of birthdays as markers of defeat. Instead, I see birthdays as opportunities to begin anew, as well as take stock in my various accomplishments, large and small.
One of the things I am most thankful for are my various friendships with people in different cities across the globe. I am also thankful for the gift of new friendships. Of course, I have my bestie from ninth grade, my homies from my first week of college, my grad school friends who were in the trenches with me during our broke and exhausted days. However, I am also so thankful for newer friends who have come into my life, from my random seatmate on a Delta airplane to a person I played cards with when a typhoon hit our vacation spot and we were rained in for a week. I choose to use my birthdays as a time to take stock of the abundance that surrounds me, and that includes the people in my life.
I remember having birthday parties as a child. A little homemade yellow cake with chocolate icing was always my favorite. At my sixth birthday, I was new to Philadelphia and my school, so my parents decided to throw me a huge birthday party so I could spend time with my new classmates. They invited all the kids from my class, as well as my sister’s grade.
Imagine close to 50 little Black girls running around through sprinklers, having the time of their lives being carefree. Little did they know that as we ran around the yard playing freeze tag (the good old days), we disturbed two beehives and a wasps’ nest. Needless to say, everyone went home crying and covered in calamine lotion—it was a memorable birthday, indeed.
This year, as I reflect on my various birthdays, the different friends I have spent my birthday with in varying locales, I will think about all of the additions to my life, this past year and in previous years. It is a blessing to blow out a new candle each year, even if the cake starts to look like a forest fire.
Christina Greer, Ph.D., is an associate professor at Fordham University; author of “Black Ethnics: Race, Immigration, and the Pursuit of the American Dream”; and co-host of the podcast FAQ-NYC and host of The Blackest Questions podcast at TheGrio.