The Birthday Post
on letting go of narrative and surrendering to the present (by way of Joan Didion and Maggie Nelson)
It’s Saint Patrick’s Day in Paris which means almost nothing since I have spent the past 24 hours in bed after a lovely birthday celebration at Café du Canal in Canal Saint-Martin which ended with me on my knees in a bathroom (not in a fun way) as a result of some sort of stomach flu.
It turns out, we all have limits, and mine is planning a dinner for 20 and turning 35. The body keeps the score.
Earlier in the week I find myself crying in Le Bazar de l’Hôtel de Ville for no other reason than because it’s Pisces season.
I need a set of screws for a mini DIY project and I’ve come to the basement of the BHV to do an errand I’ve been avoiding for months. There is no service and I’ve forgotten to Google how to say “screw” in French before walking down the escalator under the sign with an arrow that leads to the “bricolage.”
After a few rounds inspecting the merchandise, I work up the courage to ask a man who works there pouvez-vous m’aider? (can you help me?)
He responds, peut-etre (maybe).
After some back and forth he comes to understand what I need: a screw that is the same diameter on one side as the example screw I have brought with me, but with a wider head. He doesn’t have it.
He does, however, have a washer that I can add to the end of the screw to accomplish the same goal. I hadn’t thought of that. I tell him he’s a genius. He says, et c’est moin cher (and it’s less expensive).
It isn’t until I sit down at Chez Julien around the corner that I realize that while the washer will make the screw big enough to fit around the hole, it is now too big to enter the other side of the connecting piece and simultaneously too short to reach through both sides and out the other, connecting to the critical piece. The solution does not solve my problem. I will have to go back.
But back to the main event.
March 15th 2026 marked my 35th birthday and my first birthday celebrated in Paris. Both felt like milestones. I gathered a small group of friends for an apero/dinatoire Sunday evening, we had lots of wine and wonderful food and because it was my birthday I made everyone listen to me talk, with their undivided attention, for 10 minutes.
I’ve included the transcript of the speech below.
I began with a selection from the Bible (Joan Didion’s The White Album) and followed it with my favorite selection from Maggie Nelson’s prose poem “Bluets.”
There were tears all around, as is to be expected from any Pisces birthday.
“The White Album begins,
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The princess is caged in the consulate. The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea. The naked woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor is a victim of accidie, or the naked woman is an exhibitionist, and it would be “interesting” to know which. We tell ourselves that it makes some difference weather the naked woman is about to commit a mortal sin or is about to be, the Aristophanic view, snatched back to the human condition by the fireman in priest’s clothing just visible in the window behind her, the one smiling at the telephoto lens. We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of able of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience. Or at least we do for awhile…During the years when I found it necessary to revise the circuitry of my mind I discovered that I was no longer interested in whether the woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor jumped or did not jump, or in why. I was interested on in the picture of her in my mind: her hair incandescent in the floodlights, her bare toes curled inward on the stone ledge. In this light all narrative was sentimental. In this light all connections were equally meaningful…”
At some point in my adolescence I got it into my mind that I wanted to spend my 30th birthday in Paris.
I came for the first time in the summer of 2007 for a French theater program, first in Avignon and then Paris, and I spent that July lounging in the Jardin du Luxembourg, flirting with french waiters, memorizing lines in a language I did not speak. And it was in that summer that I realized I found my favorite city in the world.
I turned 29 on March 15th 2020, the first day of our official lockdown in Los Angeles and I spent the final year of my 20’s in my living room, and in my kitchen, and smoking weed while reading Russian History in my bath tub. And though that eventually led to a masters in Soviet Cinema I cannot pretend that path between those two dots was premeditated.
Joan said we tell ourselves stories in order to live but I believe we tell ourselves stories in order to survive.
I didn’t make it to Paris for my 30th birthday but here I am, in many ways by happy accident, celebrating my 35th. And that’s something.
What I have been reflecting on most this past week in the lead up to today is the importance of community, of being seen, of the life one lives existing of more than a series of disconnected moments, beautiful as many moments in Paris may be, but of those moments being witnessed.
There is no great joy in life than to be seen and I am grateful to all of you for seeing me here at 35 in Paris. Today and every day.
90. Last night I wept in a way I haven’t wept for some time. I wept until I aged myself. I watched it happen in the mirror. I watched the lines arrive around my eyes like engraves sunbursts; it was like watching flowers open in time-lapse on a windowsill. The tears not only aged my face, they also changed its texture, turned the skin of my cheeks into putty. I recognized this as a rite of decadence, but I did not know how to stop it.
91. Blue-eye, archaic: “a blueness or dark circle around the eye, from weeping or other cause.”
92. Eventually I confess to a friend some details about my weeping—its intensity, its frequency. She says (kindly) that she thinks we sometimes weep in front of a mirror not to inflame self-pity, but because we want to feel witnessed in our despair. (Can a reflection be a witness? Can one pass oneself the sponge wet with vinegar from a reed?)
93. “At first glance, it seems strange to think that an innocuous, inborn behavior such as crying could be dysfunctional or symptomatic,” writes one clinical psychologist. But, this psychologist insists, we must face the fact that some crying is simply “maladaptive, dysfunctional, or immature.”
94. –Well then, it is as you please. This is the dysfunction talking. This is the disease talking. This is how much I miss you talking. This is the deepest blue, talking, talking, always talking to you.”
I put these remarks together in the final hour before I was meant to leave my apartment and therefore, as a result of a mini printer drama, I arrived 30 minutes late to my own reservation. Oupsi ! It was not my intention but it did allow me to make an entrance.
What I was trying to say, and where I might have landed had I given myself more time to think about it, was that a preoccupation with narrative is often what has held me back in the past. Why did I want to spend my 30th birthday in Paris? What does any age mean outside of societal narratives that we’ve inherited?
Smoking weed and reading Russian history in the bathtub led to a Masters in Edinburgh. Edinburgh led to Paris and exactly six years after the beginning of the pandemic I’m celebrating both my 35th birthday as well as my first year as a proper Parisian resident. Which could mean everything, which could mean nothing.
Going back to Joan, “I am no longer interested” in the narrative that is projected on the disparate events that add up to the first half of my 30’s, I am interested only in grounding myself in the present, surrounded by people who love me, and support me, and show up to a café to sit in a back room on a beautiful Sunday when the Sun is shining and they could be anywhere in the best city in the world.
I’m 35 and I feel loved.
What I wore:
Blue & white Oversezed Oxford Button down by JW Anders for Uniqlo
White lace slipcovered dress by Dôen
Tan double-knee work pants by Carhartt (for nude illusion as well as warmth)
My father’s burgundy wool overcoat by Kenneth Cole
And a cheeky little silk scarf from [redacted bc it’s problematic]
