Happy Birthday to Me!

366 days ago, I was a different person.

I was also a YOUNGER person, but that’s besides the point.

It’s been a year since I’ve conducted my annual birthday analysis, trying to see where I’ve come and what I’ve left behind. My 27th year has definitely been full of ups and downs (hopefully more ups than downs) and through it all, I’ve lived and learned.

Cliche? Oh yes. But so true.

In the last 366 days, I’ve bought a new house, gotten a new puppy, fallen in something-like-love, fallen out of something-like-love, broken up with someone, been broken up with (via email, no less), laughed my head off, cried my heart out, been challenged, challenged others, made some mistakes and learned from them.

I’ve hurt and been hurt.
I’ve loved and been loved.

I’ve made the wrong choices, I’ve acted stupidly, I’ve done everything wrong. And sometimes, by chance or by choice, I’ve done it all right.

I can’t say I’ve loved every day of my 27th year, but I can say I’ve learned from them all. Even today. Even right now. Even in the midst of pain and hurt and tears and wondering when the hell is it going to stop, when is it going to just make sense? I’ve not yet figured it out, but I know I’m somewhere today that I couldn’t have been was it not for the last 366 days.

And so I welcome this next chapter of my life, my 28th year here on earth. I doubt it’ll be easy, but it’ll be worth it.

I didn’t think this day would come. Not that it’s a bad day, mind you, I just thought – given who I am, given my current predilections – that this day was never imminent.

Oh, but we surprise ourselves daily.

It’s not that I thought I was too good for it; on the contrary. It’s more a matter of preference, of druthers.

And yet, as often happens as we turn older, our tastes change. Three years ago I wasn’t ready for it; two months ago, probably not either. But now? Timing combined with situational constructs means what once was passe now is fabulous. What once was undesired is now much adored.

It doesn’t help that I am who I am, that lists often beckon my life, that I’ve already put more forethought into my Labor Day plans than many have about their upcoming weekend. I usually pontificate, over-analyze, trying to make sure that what I want is really, really what I want. Perhaps due to my unfocused nature of late, perhaps for other reasons, but this time, I didn’t go the normal route, didn’t look and search and compare and stress…for once, as uncharacteristic as it is, I just went with it.

So yes, for this birthday, I didn’t make a list. I didn’t even have in the back of my mind what I wanted (a good thing, since I officially celebrate the 7th anniversary of my legal drinking age birthday in less than 48 hours – read: Turn 28 on June 8th) but instead, fell upon something that I wanted and voila! There was my perfect birthday present.

But really, who would have EVER thought that I would have chosen California Closets over clothes?

I hate sports analogies.

I’m not one of those writers who thinks ‘striking out’ is a witty alternative to say that your pompous attitude and vicious ego caused you to go home sans nookie. Nor will you ever hear me use the 1980 US Hockey team in an inspirational post. Those motivational posters at the mall with the cyclist pedaling up a hill, the sun setting in the background? CHEE-zy. Nope, not for me.

So imagine my surprise when I found myself comparing sports and love at a dinner last night. In the midst of a carafe of chianti, in the company of dear friends, I found myself waxing poetic on the subject, and despite my prior aversion to the practice, it made sense.

It MAKES sense.

Dating is the only game where, before you succeed, you lose every single time. It bucks the odds – in any sport, where do you lose EVERY game and not quit the team? If you were to strike out at every at-bat, would you keep going up there and swinging for the field? Probably not. But dating, perhaps because its outcome is hypothetically and proverbially “worth it”, is the outlier. It beckons the hardy, the road-weary, the tiresome. It encompasses us all – from the smallest runt to the largest brute – and invites us in its banter. Dating – and its close-cousin Love – are liken to today’s Texas-Hold ‘Em poker invasion, with just about everyone throwing their name in the hat.

That’s not to say it doesn’t involve practice – just like any good sport, you have to work at it, going through the motions again and again until you think you’ve got it just right, only to find yourself up at the plate connecting with only air. That’s also not to say that the practice isn’t fun – in fact, practice doesn’t always seem like work! You can forget you’re actually playing a game, but – as many of you would agree – love is the ultimate game whether we like it or not. Yet despite our trouble, our toil, our resilience, until we finally hit the ball out of the park to win the game, we remain – sadly – lost.

I’m a persistent type of gal. I lost more grade school elections than one should and still continued to sign up each fall on the poster board in the hallway. I’m ridiculously tone-deaf yet always auditioned for a solo. As a (pseudo) adult I’ve had my heart broken so many times I thought I’d never recover yet again am held captive by the lure of the dream, instantly forgetting how it felt to cry myself to sleep. If it was any other sport, I would have long ago hung up my skates, thrown down my glove, bent my golf club out of repeated failure – but it’s not. I – and perhaps you – continue to get up there, head held high, and give it another shot, hoping this time will be the exception to the rule, crossing my fingers that it’ll be MY name they announce on the intercom. In the meantime, however, I’ll be busy practicing.

He laughed aloud.

It wasn’t for anybody else’s benefit – he had just heard some good news, and really didn’t give it a second thought as he chuckled to himself. It was an ebullient, gleeful laugh – one that fills up your lungs and without realizing it, you’ve got a smile on your face. Laughter like that, not to evoke the sentiments of some cheezy coffee-table book author, are good for your soul.

I heard him laugh through the wall – they’re actually quite thin here – and wondered to myself what the news was. Did he get the job he was wanting? Did he hear from his wife? Did his daily lottery ticket hit the $500 prize? A laugh that authentic, that pristine, indicates that his happiness is pure, unblemished, and that for one fleeting second – regardless of what happens later in the day – he was happy.

I found myself jealous. Those moments where your laughter is contageous, where you feel your inside rise up with the fluttery feeling that is true giddiness, doesn’t happen that often, not just to me, but to any of us. Those are the days when you find yourself walking on air – when there’s a silly little perma-grin on your face and even waiting in the loooonnnnnggggg line at Chick-Fil-A for your fave ice dream (hugely oversized in a cup o’ ice dreaminess) doesn’t even phase you. It’s like walking around in dreamland where all is right in the world – where the guy calls when he says he will, when your jeans come out of the dryer a size too BIG(!!), when your dog sleeps through the night and you arrive at work with a vase of tulips waiting for you on your desk. If you were a Disney character, you’d have the oversized-Cinderella eyes and the birds would be chirping on your shoulder.

Yeah. That type of day.

I don’t really remember the last time I had that kind of day, but it wasn’t until I heard the laughter – the loose, trilling laugh of the man next door – that I realized how long it had been.

I need that laughter, that day. I’m long overdue.

The other side of the story.

I always wonder about this – I know how I perceived the situation, but know that the very same event, looked at from another point of view, is a very different sotry. It’s only natural – there’s the truth, the actual occurrance of events, and then there’s the perception of said events. And herein lies the disparity.

Pride often takes center stage in a breakup. Either party may want to contact the other, but hubris mixed with insecurity often prevents it. So things remain unsaid and that incongruence in perceived reality not only remains, but grows. Instead of sitting down and talking through everything, we over-analyze and consult our friends, and after days turn into weeks turn into months, something that once was so promising ends up as “he threw in the towel” and “she’s crazy”, monikers that – after years have passed and you run into each other at a restaurant with your new partners – will be the one sentence explanation of your acquaintance. It’s a shame, really – this compartmentalizing and over-generalization negates the way that holding his hand made you feel like a part of something or the easy laughter of the day in the sun, only to be replaced by three-word labels.

And so what remains unsaid is the nail in the proverbial coffin, the point of no return. Later on is just too late to revisit – you’ve both moved on, the unsaid should remain as such. The beginning of a new chapter resolutely marks the end of the one that precedes it, and while that’s not always bad, it’s a shame that it’s partially due to a self-mandated silence, the very silence that contains the other side of the story.

Anyone besides me notice a resemblance?

Lately, I’ve been thinking about how my life would be different without this website. Besides the amazing people I’ve met through it, or the writing jobs I’ve gotten because of it, I wonder what – if anything – would be different if aubreysabala.com never existed. And, while on this train of thought, I’ve talked to a few of my friends and asked them this question:

Do you think my life would be easier if I didn’t have my website?

One response: Sometimes I think you cause yourself more pain than joy with your website.

Then, of course, I had to discuss and explain, which I’ll attempt to do here.

My friends – these are some of the closest, dearest people to me. They know me in & out, have lived with me over the years, even when I sincerely thought that buying a sweater in size XL at J. Crew was in fashion. They’ve lived through a ton of laughter, a ton of tears, and even a few amaretto sours before math class. And their sentiments are real, are kind, I honestly know without a doubt that they want the best for me, so when I see them questioning a part of my life, or my behaviour, I listen up. As I have been doing.

Their stance – that they don’t understand how, or why, I choose to be this honest, at least in a public forum. To them it would make more sense if I wrote these thoughts in a journal – online or otherwise – for only my eyes to see it. While I get where they’re coming from, I don’t agree…and that’s why I’m trying to figure out why I don’t.

I started this site in 2001 as a work project, something to do in some downtime. The style was much different, but the content has, for the most part, remained about the same. This was right around when blogs were getting big; I, being only on the cusp of techno-nerd-coolness, didn’t realize that my meager little site may one day fall under that moniker. To me, it was a place where I could highlight my writing as I was still struggling to get published…I needed a place to have a portfolio and a place to exercise my writing. So aubreysabala.com was created, and four years later, is what it is (whatever that is) today.

Through the years, it’s gotten a lot more personal. The articles – as I still call them – aren’t nearly as stand-alone as they once were; years back, I was able to submit many of them and publish them in various publications & magazines without much editing. They were about universal thoughts – guys and girls and observations about life, love, etc. As I still think they often are. However, as more people came to the site and the readership increased, it became more of its own entity, more of the “Aubrey has a website.” And, well, I suppose I do.

So, through the course of time, it logically also became something that people I was close to, including people I dated, knew about and even visited. And this, similar only to my parents in nature, is where it gets a little harried.

My friends think it’s a bit too personal at times, especially if they put themselves in the place of a date or a boyfriend or even an ex-boyfriend. And I understand – it might just be. But to me, it’s part of who I am, take it or leave it. As with most things about me, there’s rarely a gray area…it’s all or nothing. And yes, I know I could probably write this all with some password protection, guarding my inner-most feelings a little more closely, but that’s not who I am, not how I’ve chosen to do this.

There’s some catharsis that comes along with shedding all inhibitions, knowing that if anything, anywhere, in my life, I’m telling the truth here. And even though I know (in some cases) or assume (in others) that there are people reading this that I may not want to, or are here remaining in my life in a virtual sense after they’ve exited it in a physical sense (something that I’m still coming to terms with – it just doesn’t seem fair somehow that they can leave but still be here), I think it’s more important for me to continue on. I’m making that choice knowingly, willingly, understanding what I’m risking. It’s because part of what makes it real, for me, as a writer, is the very expression of it, painful or not, to the world, which I suppose includes those from days and months and years gone by who I’d otherwise wish farewell to but – given this forum – have no say on their presence on the site.

Also, I think the very process of learning discretionary writing is somehow important. Instead of blatantly saying “John Doe, you broke my heart, you know that, don’t you?”, I somehow, in some form, am coming to terms with it myself over the next weeks & months, and that sentence will end up somehow making sense in a very different wording. As with most things, expressing such public feelings and coming to terms with them take time, and by having to learn this discretion publically, in my writing, it’s like I’m easing into the acceptance of it all myself on my OWN time frame.

It’s a question of authenticity and free will. For instance, when I’m going through a hard time, I have a choice presented in front of me: I can either write about it now, albeit not naming names or specific situations, knowing that people involved may just wander over here to see how I’m handling it all, or otherwise choose to write something safe, something innocuous, somthing that has NOTHING to do with what’s really going on in my head. And the choice is different each time – sometimes I take the leap, put my heart on my sleeve as I’ve done so many times in the past, write authentically what I’m feeling; other times it’s still too soon, too close to me, and though it’s almost harder to keep it refrained, I choose the safe route, and in doing so feel myself heading down the path of blithe drabble that is as disposable as anything I’ve jotted down on a napkin.

Sometimes I wish I was a singer instead of a writer, at least to remove the immediacy. Their personal feelings get written one day but sung about days or months or years later when the pain has dulled and the very thing that made them cry is being spun on radio stations all over the country as a catchy refrain. And yes, I have the choice to write this now and display it later – I’ve done that many times. But it doesn’t feel the same to me, again I feel a sense of unauthenticity. So, for now, this is the method that I know to work. Tomorrow? It may change. But today? It’s what gets me through.

To quote Anna Nalick:

2 AM and I’m still awake, writing a song
If I get it all down on paper, it’s no longer
inside of me, threatening the life it belongs to
And I feel like I’m naked in front of the crowd
Cause these words are my diary, screaming out loud
And I know that you’ll use them, however you want to.

Use these words however you want to – that’s what there here for.

Aaah, Summer.

Yes, I know you’re not technically here yet, but trust me, I’m ready. In anticipation of your arrival, I have already unpacked all of my bathing suits (even if I still haven’t unearthed the majority of the “true” necessities.) Perhaps it’s the weather and the fact that I haven’t driven my car with the top UP in over a week. Or it might be the distinctive smells that announce your impending arrival that I’ve rediscovered on my new pre-work run with the pup. Or maybe it’s because the true joys of the summer – namely, the beginning of the Aubrey Cookout Series – is beginning this week. Whatever the case, I can’t wait to see you.

The evolution of the Aubrey Cookout Series spans back to years past when I got a grill as an Easter present from my Dad. (‘Who gets Easter presents?’, you ask. UM, that would be me. But I digress.) Anyhoo, a lazy Sunday by the pool also warranted some grilled chicken and burgers on the barbie. A boring Saturday night without plans? Come on by. You bring the food, I’ve got the beer, and – voila! A tradition was formed.

And so we continue this tradition this weekend, with the weather hopefully beckoning friends near and – well, if Buckhead is far, then far – to Casa de Sabala for some fun, friends, and festivities, I can’t help but think that you might be getting ready to arrive. And since your arrival includes two beach weekends (Hello, Destin! Hello, Wrightsville Beach! Hello, feet in the sand, sun on my back, tan lines and more!) and a trip to the Phoenician as well as 12 days in Hawaii, if this is the unofficial beginning, then I just have one thing to say:

Welcome, Summer. I’m glad you’re right around the corner.

I’ve been talking to my exes.

No, not talking in the ‘let’s get back together’ sort of way, nor in the ‘hey baby, it’s 3am…wanna come over’ variety either. Enough time has passed with these certain individuals that I know that both of those situations are not only unlikely, but ill-advised. But on the same note, enough time HAS passed where a phone call isn’t seen as an invitation, nor a suggestion of anything; rather, it’s seen for what it is. A call to say ‘hello’, to see how they’re doing, to catch up with someone who once played a huge role in your life. And it’s from talking to these very people that I realized something – that, after the drama has died down, all the tears have dried and the dust has settled on the love-long-gone, they often hold the key to your future. Thus I mandate that all relationships need an “EX-it Interview”

Similar to a debrief after a very important corporate meeting where all details are discussed and rehashed to help you prepare the deliverables and meet future & current expectations, the “EX-it Interview” is equally important to YOUR future. The ex, whether a former adulterer or boring dud, holds valuable information that you need, things that can help you going forward, can prevent you from making the same mistakes. As long as you’re on good terms (or heck, even solid footing) with said ex, I’ve personally begun to realize how helpful they can be. (Now if only they were that helpful when you were dating…but that’s another story for another time.)

Yes, I’ve been talking to my exes lately, only to find that I remember some things much differently than they do. They remember the the football game; I remember crying afterwards. They remember the beach; I remember carting all the stuff to and fro by myself and getting frustrated. But they remember a few other things – they remember talking on the phone until the wee hours of the night, and the nickname they always called me that I had since forgotten. They remember the road trips, the times we would sit out on the deck drinking while the sun went down, cracking ourselves up over nothing. And its in these “EX-it Interviews” where you have the chance to ask questions about yourself in the past, the “was I overly insecure when we dated” or “did you think I was jealous” type of questions. The things that really matter, the things that you’re trying to avoid in your current relationship, the things that if you knew you were doing them, you’d stop, the things you really need to know.

So yes. I’ve been talking to my exes. I’m just not sure I’m ready for the latest “EX-it Interview.” Not yet, at least.