:: :: thirty things :: ::

things you should know about me:

i am a birthday lover.
i am recovering (recovered?) from postpartum depression.
i didn't realize it but i think my ppd started to descend like a thick charcoal fog on my birthday last year. or at least, i think that a series of unfortunate events that ended up being really traumatic for me started last year on the very day i turned 29.

that's when i got sick. a cold, sure, but one of those really bad up-all-night sick-for-four-solid-weeks colds. an evil cold that reduced me to tears. a cold that made me wonder how i could possibly care for evan while feeling like i might actually keel over and die. i felt wicked. vile. i felt possessed. i spent more than 20 consecutive nights on the couch coughing.

if i had yet recovered the posts from march and april of last year, i'd link to at least a handful of posts bemoaning my illness. it just wouldn't go away.

and this year i've been dreading my birthday not because i'm turning thirty (i'm actually quite psyched about my thirties) and not because i'm aging or whatever but because i just can't seem to detatch dates from experiences. last year's march 24th (and may 31st, and june 5th, and july 4th) reaches invisible silk threads into the future and wraps slender tentacles around its 2009 counterpart. i can feel the threads around me like a tunnel and even though i know that the beginning and the end of that tunnel are not one and the same time and place, i fear them both anyhow.

all of this is to say that for my birthday this year, i am being extra nice to myself. taking extra good care of myself. i revisited my feelgood list last night and added a few items, moved some things around, and have presented myself with the gift of time enough to cross everything off this week. instead of ten supernice things for myself (the last category on the feelgood list is a ten-a-la-carte category) i am going to try to do thirty supernice things for myself this week.

because i deserve it and because 2009 is not the new 2008. it's just 2009.