Any Dream Will Do

I turned 46 entire years old this week!

Monday was my 46th birthday.

That's the wildest sentence I have ever typed in my life, and I know a thing or two about wild sentences, having spent a decade recapping a TV show where people wore masks of their own faces on top of their actual faces (Pretty Little Liars, just FYI). It's not that I don't feel 46. I told a nurse recently that I was three thousand years old. It's because I feel all of those years so keenly that I'm shocked and thrilled and, frankly, really fucking proud that I can sit here and type that sentence. Forty-six! What a triumph!

Monday morning, when I woke up, my wife was reading in bed beside me, like basically every other morning. When I yawned and stretched, she descended on me with kisses and gifts and birthday wishes. "It's your mom's birthday!" she told all the cats. "One of our most special and important days!"

I told Stacy I'd been dreaming we were trying to escape from a Willy Wonka-style bread factory, and we had to do it by letting ourselves go through the whole bread-making process. We both got beaten up in the mixer, but luckily we were both agile enough not to get sliced up in the final phase, before the bread-making assembly line dumped us safely out in the parking lot. The night before that, I dreamed I had a pair of magical roller skates that gave me super speed. And the night before that, I dreamed I was Quantum Leaping into other people's bodies to solve mysteries.

Stacy's so good at listening to all my whimsical nighttime adventures, and she always looks at me with such tender affection when I'm telling her about them, because for the first 13 years we slept in the same bed, I had incessant, horrific, recurring night terrors about my past. I woke up sweating, yelling, thrashing, crying, punching at the air. I was terrified to go to sleep, every single night. I tried everything to get rid of the dreams and nothing worked. I thought I'd have them forever, but in the past year, the night terrors have simply vanished. I never get them anymore. My dreams are good-weird now.

I don't write very much about the depression I've dealt with almost all of my life, and probably I never will. I absolutely don't ever go into detail about the times when I have very much not wanted to be an alive person on this planet. I think it would really hurt and terrify the people I love to read about it. But I mean, it's honestly pretty simple. In the third grade, my life was so messed up in ways I couldn't even begin to understand or process that I just started wishing I wasn't here — and that wish never fully went away. There is a river of deep, deep sadness running through my heart and there always will be. And that's okay.

I've written and written and written about it over the years, but I still don't think I've ever really fully captured the experience of being a closeted, confused lesbian in the rural south, in a deeply evangelical Christian environment, growing up in an unstable home with an abusive mother. That kind of experience doesn't just fuck you up in the present; it fucks up the train tracks in your brain so badly that you have to build a whole new infrastructure and a whole new form of transportation if you're ever going to move around inside your own head in a healthy way. If you're ever going to move through the world in a way that makes you a safe person for the folks you love. It's hard and it's exhausting and it's painful and sad and scary and expensive to seek help for the kind of childhood I had. And even if you do everything right, and give it all you've got, there are still so many factors out of your control that affect your ability to actually heal.

Stacy was the first person I ever met who understood me when I said, "I'm always going to be a little bit heartbroken." The only person who's ever simply accepted that truth.

That's what I was thinking on the morning of my 46th birthday. How incandescently lucky I was to be waking up next to the person I love most in the world; this brilliant, fierce woman who cares for me and adores me in ways I still can't fully comprehend; giggling and opening up some new Nintendo controllers and the kind of 80s socks I like with the stripes on them. So seen, so known, so cherished.

I have lived 46 entire years on this planet. 46 full years! I've had to claw my way to every good thing in my life. I've had to teach myself how to do almost everything, including how to survive. But now I'm not just surviving anymore. This week, for the first time in my grown-up life on my birthday, I woke up and let my life be celebrated without having to shake off the fog of a twisted dream about an awful memory. My grandparents called and sang to me, my friends and family texted, and I sat beside my wife in the quiet comfort of our home, cats in our laps, Christmas tree candle crackling, reading and laughing and cheering on our sports teams.

This birthday felt different, not because it’s firmly middle-age, but because I feel different. I feel whole. I feel sturdy. I feel calm. I feel at home inside my own brain and heart and body, in a way I’ve never felt before. I feel like the me-est me I’ve ever been.

As we were getting ready for bed, Stacy said, "Was it a good day, my love?"

I kissed her and told it was my best birthday ever because it was a day like all of our other days together. It’s what I always want, every holiday, just one of our days. I told her I was hoping for the magical roller skate sleep-time adventure again, but any mythical midnight excursion would do. I'm 46, I'm alive, I'm so proud to be me. And I'm not afraid of my dreams anymore.