Phetasy News - Scared to Run Out of Time

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Nov 18, 2022

Greetings from the Phetaverse!

I turned 44 this week and it’s very strange. It feels like just yesterday I was turning 33 (or thirty FREE as I liked to call it) and heading out on my years-long globe trot. Hard to believe it was over a decade ago now; they really do just start to blur together after you turn 25.

What makes this birthday exceptional, is that it’s the first birthday I have a child. It also puts into perspective what my birthday might mean to my parents. The memories they have from that day, or even that moment in their lives, as they’ve been divorced a long, long time now. The passage of time. My father calls me every year and says, “I can’t believe I have a [INSERT WHATEVER AGE I AM]!” The passage of time. The gratitude that I’m still even here to celebrate this day.

There were many years that I wasn’t so sure I’d make it. My natal birthday coming a month after my sober birthday seems appropriate. Before I went into rehab at 19, I spent three days detoxing in a psych ward. In between talking to the various plants, a man made sure to tell me I didn’t stand a “Snowball’s chance in hell of living to see 21.” Challenge accepted. I’m so stubborn, that crazy dude may well have saved my life.

My birthdays are always less celebration and more contemplation of my own mortality—and by extension the mortality of everyone I love. Birthdays put me in a state of melancholy about the randomness of life and how fleeing it all is. I reflect on the time I’ve squandered and shudder to think of how much I might have left. Will I see another birthday? We really never know, do we? Every day is a gift.

I think Bonnie Raitt sums it up the best in her song “Nick of Time”:

“I see my folks are getting on/and I watch their bodies change/I know they see the same in me/And it makes us both feel strange/No matter how you tell yourself/It’s what we all go through/Those lines are pretty hard to take/When they’re staring back at you/Oh Oh Oh, scared you’ll run out of time.”