Birthday Reflections on Being Human

Sin at 17, Humanity at 37

Today is my 37th birthday. I woke at 4am with a heavy heart, heavy eyelids, a headache. September brings a flood of birthdays in my family; this week also marks considerable loss. A dear friend who passed at 15, my grandfather who died seventeen years ago, and just yesterday brought a fresh family loss on my husband’s side. 

Grief grips me, then immediate guilt: I am not feeling grateful enough on my birthday. I should be grateful for my 37 years, my curious and healthy children, my tender husband, the friends and family who surround us, this life I get to live. 

With great gifts comes a great burden not to squander, for me at least. I fear I’m not grateful enough, not savoring enough, not looking up from my phone enough. I fear I’m wasting this one wild and precious life feeling simultaneously stressed and bored. 

Twenty years ago, heck two years ago, I would have stayed in the guilt, chased it down, made a grumbling guilt-ridden birthday home. I would have made birthday resolutions and forced myself into gratitude. I would have stewed and snapped at those around me. 

Today, I embrace that these mixed feelings make me human. 

Feeling ambivalent about getting older? Join the club.

Worried about getting everything right for my kids? Join the club. 

Too attached to my phone? Join the club. 

Contemplating Botox or at the very least those Frownie patches? Join the late thirties club. 

I am not a failure; I am a human reacting in understandable ways to our good and hard and bewildering world.

I’ve been working on a writing project that has plunged me back into some high school memories. 

Picture teenage Aly: lots of acne (and back-ne!), the tiniest hint of babylights, probably wearing some obnoxious cargo pants you can currently find on the shelves at Target. I have a teal iMac in my room and and you’ll alternately find me blasting DC Talk’s In the Light, the Coyote Ugly soundtrack, and Snoop Dog’s The Next Episode in my two-door Honda Prelude with Hawaiian seat covers, an ALYGURL vanity plate, and matching “Girl for God” license holder. 

At 17 I wanted so desperately to do good and be good, yet everything made me feel bad. I did not know I had Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. I did not know OCD fed me rules that were impossible to keep. That keeping me trapped and guilty was OCD’s goal.

I thought the near constant barrage of guilt and conviction I felt was because I deserved it. I was that bad–and probably worse if I stopped to really reflect on my life and shortcomings. 

I share this now, not to feel sorry for 17-year-old me, but to mark how far I’ve come in allowing myself to be human. 

A non-exhaustive list of things that felt like sin at age 17:

• Anxiety = lack of trust in God

• Anger = if I look at someone with anger, then I have murdered my brother

• Loneliness = lack of communion with Jesus, who should be my best friend

• Wanting a boyfriend = not trusting Jesus to fill the God-shaped hole in my heart

• Any negative emotion = lack of trust in God, my wicked flesh tricking me

• Depression = inability to believe that God loves me and has a purpose for me. (Re-read the prayer of Jabez or the Purpose Driven Life to snap out of this funk)

• Unfinished tasks =if I know the good I ought do and do not do it, I have sinned

• Poor self-esteem = not believing that God loves me

• Poor body image = not believing that I am fearfully and wonderfully made, plus I’m shallow and concerned with "things of this world"

• Not evangelizing to everyone I see every chance I get = condemning them to hell (even my grandma!), not making disciples of all the nations

• Procrastinating = squandering/not being a good steward of my time

• Having to ask a question/not knowing the answer = failure of I don’t know what, but it sure felt like a sin

• Not being grateful = a direct affront to the God who works all things together for my good

When I first wrote this list, I felt enlightened and superior because I no longer count these as sins. I gloated a bit in my own faith deconstruction and OCD recovery journey. Yet this very morning I chastised myself for not feeling “the right amount of gratitude” on my birthday, and I am reminded again that this work is ongoing. I am not writing from a place of arrival, but to encourage myself to keep fighting to embrace my own humanity. To keep choosing to see myself and my “failures” as part of being human. To keep responding with kindness. To keep working toward building a faith that accounts for emotions and bad days and recurrent challenges. 

One of my favorite OCD therapists, Jon Hershfield (who actually coined the term Glitch in the Good Enough to describe OCD), said “Sometimes we focus so hard on being a good human, we don’t let ourselves be human.”

On my 37th birthday, my gift to myself is to be human. To be inconsistent and unresolved and unfinished. To savor and squander. To feel heavy and chase the light. To love myself and my life just as it is.

Help me feel less alone on my birthday! Do you feel ambivalent about aging? What are some feelings or experiences you used to count as sin or feel guilty about? What are some ways you are learning to be human?