A friends’ birthday tradition, actually answered this year
I was into musicals before it was cool. I wouldn’t say I was a theater kid, but if you’ve been here a while, you know music is a core part of me.
I know how that sounds now, in the era of Hamilton and Wicked. But when I was growing up, this was not a culturally safe thing to be into. Neither was anime (Sailor Moon, Neon Genesis Evangelion, to name a few), or J-pop (Utada Hikaru, Ayumi Hamasaki) — and then K-pop (H.O.T., S.E.S.), before K-pop became mainstream in America. I was — am — an introvert with very specific taste who was not, for the record, doing the “cool girl” thing. No parties, no sports. Japanese RPGs and learning all the words of the Cinderella soundtrack. The Brandy and Whitney Houston one. The one with Paolo Montalban as the prince (iykyk).
I didn’t know then that I would look back at this girl and think she had it right all along.
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My friends have a birthday tradition. Every year, the person celebrating answers three questions:
What from the last year are you carrying with you?
What are you leaving behind?
What are you excited about?
It started, I think, as a party game and became something more — a ritual you say out loud to the people who love you, which makes it more real than a journal entry… or a Substack post.
This year, I actually thought about my answers.
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What I’m carrying with me
Somewhere between college and learning to go out and be a person in the world, I set some things down. The way you set something down when your hands are full — you mean to come back for it, and then you forget where you put it.
I stopped gaming. I stopped watching anime. I let the K-pop comebacks happen without getting too excited about them. I stopped doing things partly because there wasn’t time, and partly because I had started running everything through a filter in a way I’d never done before. Is this a thing I’m supposed to like? Is this a thing a person my age does? I had decided — whether consciously or not — that some interests were teenage interests. Things to grow out of rather than grow with.
I was recently singing “Cool Rider” — yes, from the Grease 2 soundtrack — and imagining I was a young Michelle Pfeiffer dreaming about a bad boy on a motorcycle. And I thought “oh. I was always this girl.”
I remembered that girl with the niche taste and the strong opinions and zero interest in going to the party. She was ahead on the K-pop thing by years. But more than that, she just liked what she liked. No filter. No running it by the committee of who she was supposed to be. She trusted herself. And this year gave me that back. I’m carrying it into the next year with me.
What I’m leaving behind
Self-doubt. Took long enough. It’s a practice every day, but I’m trying my damnedest to leave it behind.
What I’m excited about
More. More of figuring out what I like, and more of trusting it once I find it. More learning the shape of my own taste. The things I keep coming back to, what I thought I wanted but actually don’t, what I wrote off and shouldn’t have. More friends, more love. More travel, always.
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Teenage me would be delighted. She’d probably also say “I told you so.”
I like her a lot.
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