My Birthday
My Birthday always stirs up a lot of emotions for me, July 16th 2017 I turned 27. Now I do not mind the fact I am getting older, I do not view myself as my “age” I like to view myself on how I feel. I feel youthful because I believe internally that I am youthful and it ends up showing externally. People are shocked when I say I am 27 they always think 23. I truly believe we create our realities and I choose to believe I am forever young.
Now to the reason why I get emotional, It is due to “friendship” – I am a very loyal friend, as part of CODA (Codependents Anonymous): We are loyal and stay in harmful situations too long, including friendships. Now As I go back through my years of friendships, I seem to always be cut deeply by women. This has been a struggle for me to get close to women because I am in fear that they will “abandon” me, like they have in the past. I put so much emotional investment into these female relationships and set up expectations of how they “should” treat me back, however I would say I have been a “doormat” type friend. I was always there for them allowing them to mistreat me and toss me to the side when I was not longer useful to them. Now I used to think there was something wrong with me, “why do I not have these beautiful two sided friendships.” Working in CODA and AA, has taught me there is nothing wrong with me as a person but there was something wrong with the people I choose to be in my life and the lack of boundaries I had for myself. I had/have defects of character I needed to work on before I can attract healthy loving relationships.
Andrea said something beautiful to me at one point that stuck, ”You attract people who are at your same self esteem level.” This means I need to have greater respect for myself and who deserves to be part of my life, set boundaries with friends so they view me as equal, and surround myself with people doing amazing things in life. We become like the five people we surround ourselves with, surround yourself with people who you want to be like. Now that being said, This birthday I went about it all differently.
Normally I expect a friend to have a party for me and if no one wants to come to my party then that means I am a loser and then there I go down the rabbit hole- I go though my friends and think who would even want to do something with me, I do not want to be a nuisance, I am not cool enough, no one likes me, I have no friends. I also moved to Arizona so In order to see my friends I would have to Fly for $400 to Utah to throw myself a party… Now that does not sound very special. I finally decided, to hand it over to my “Higher Power.” That is when the magic happened, I texted the girls I have met here in AZ and asked them to join me for yoga and a birthday dinner. It was uncomfortable because I had only ever hung out with one of the five I texted but they all said,”Yes!” I just let it flow, some were not able to make both yoga, and dinner but made it to one or the other. I did not over plan or over think and it was honestly one of the best birthdays I have ever had. I chose people to come who I view have what I want in a friendship, I am excited to see these friendships blossom.
