28 Cakes: Granting Myself Freedom On My 29th Birthday

Every year I lean over an ice cream cake and use my breath to extinguish a tiny, bouncing flame. Bits of wax drip and roll into the whipped icing as my family claps and sings Stevie’s version of Happy Birthday; loud, and way off key. More often than not, I don’t have a wish prepared, so I say a little prayer for happiness and health. I have done this 28 times. This year will be no different, except, I intend to spend my entire year exhaling.

Tomorrow I will begin the last year of my 20’s. I haven’t been as happy to be alive on my birthday since my 24th. And I certainly haven’t ever been as proud of the work I’m doing for myself. Between 25 and 28, my birthdays felt muted. I felt nothing. I wished for nothing. I dreamed of nothing. I released nothing.

I’m not here to reflect on 28. It was not easy. My life seldom is. But a rumbling within is telling me that this path forward to a new decade is sacred ground. I am close to another awakening. There’s just one thing I have to do first.

Unload. There are things in my life that I can’t heave into next year. Hell, some of them can’t follow me to next month. So it’s time to unload. I’ll warn you that these things are heavy. I have not been at a mental capacity to write regularly outside of my journal for quite some time. Though most of the things I intend to release are chronicled in my private pages, I won’t be fully free until they are brought to light.

The quote that has been chasing me through 2020, in one form or another, is “you cannot heal from what you don’t acknowledge.” Basically, I can either hide things or heal from things, but I can’t do both. And with this nugget of truth I begin my 29th ride on this rock around the sun, clearing out baggage that I have no room for in the next chapter. I am working through and acknowledging the things that have had power over me, some for decades.

This year I’m gifting myself with freedom. Freedom from a haunting fear that has followed me around for two years. Freedom from a nauseating guilt that isn’t really mine to bear at all. Freedom from a debilitating shame that has made me shy away from the things I deserve. The three of these burdens, fear, guilt, and shame, will be documented in a short Ever So Roco blog post series entitled #WhatIRelease, starting next week with Fear.

The ritual remains the same. Tomorrow when the last note of Happy Birthday is completed, I will take a deep breath over my 29th cake. Someone will inevitably say “don’t spit!” I’ll laugh, compose myself, dake a deep breath, and exhale. 29. The year of release. Here we go.

XO,
Roco