-The following is a bit of a long post but I hope it gives you a bit of a mood lift, like I’m feeling today ❤ 🙂 (please forgive any typos too-I had a headache last night when editing this)

Today is my birthday!  Thank you for all the amazing well-wishes I’ve already received and (getting ahead of myself here) for any that some of you may still give me! 🙂  I am so grateful to have another wonderful year and to spend it with the people I love, and that now includes you wonderful people who are part of my online/blog family.  Whether you regularly read this blog or are new here, I am grateful to every one of you and a big thank you for visiting and I hope you’ll stick around 🙂 ❤

A birthday is a special time in our lives especially for children.  There are dreams of receiving wonderful gifts or of doing amazing things and a birthday, for most of us as children, is a time when we can look forward to things getting better.  As we get older though, it’s often the case that birthdays lose their meaning and many adults pass that special day barely acknowledging it, or in some cases fearing it as it marks another year of age and lack of youth.  But how should we feel on our birthdays?  And should we be making any birthday wishes?

Childhood wishes

When I was a child, like many kids, a birthday was all about a celebration.  I didn’t always have many friends to visit me or to have a birthday party with, but a birthday was always a time to enjoy getting cards, presents and to celebrate the fact I was a year older.  A child’s perspective on a birthday is all about getting older, and ageing isn’t seen as a bad thing.  The best part of my birthday came when I was due to blow out the candles on my cake.  Not only was the cake a beautiful one each year (completely decorated in colourful marzipan by my very talented mum who would create the most amazing pictures and scenes!) but it also contained an ever growing number of candles which represented how old I was, and it always, always meant I could make a wish for something special.

Wishing for something and then blowing out the candles is a tradition a lot of us take part in but it’s something I really enjoyed doing as a child because I could dream of all the silly things I wanted to get like some toy, book or gadget!   As the years went by though, my wishes became something more and I began to wish for different things when entering my teens.  My teenage years were difficult for me, I was heavily bullied at school and had little support with both that and my health (mental-depression and a chronic illness) from teachers which made every day at school a difficult one.  My dreams when blowing out the candles were occasionally based on  physical things I wanted like a videogame, but most of the time I wished for things like being liked by the girls or teachers at school, to not be bullied or to be good at something (I felt I wasn’t good at anything back then).

Grown-up dreams?

As I matured, physically (mentally I still felt very young), and became an adult I found it difficult to enjoy my birthdays.  Despite the fact I was only just into my adult years, I felt such a failure from a lack of direction at school and not having a worthwhile career.  This led me to both enjoy and at the same time get depressed over my birthday.  The day itself I would celebrate as I always had always done and I always made a point of doing something fun for myself (like watching a favourite dvd) but I couldn’t deny the overwhelming feeling of sadness I had on the special day and I would always wish to find direction or wish to not be depressed.

After a while I stopped really wishing, I found it hard to imagine and dream about what I wanted and this made it hard for me to even wish for things at my birthday.  I knew it was the depression that made it happen, but as long as I was so depressed, I couldn’t dream of anything I wanted and when it came to blowing out the candles I spent longer and longer trying to even imagine what I wished for, letting the candles burn and the wax melt all over the cake as I spent so long just trying to think up a single wish.  It just wasn’t the joyous fun it had been when I was a child.

A change

A lot happened to me in the last few years and I went through a bit of a traumatic experience with my health.  A few years ago my health reached an all time low when I was taking the wrong insulin for the type 1 diabetes I had.  I won’t detail it here but you can read about my experiences in this post: Why Modern Analogue Insulins Can Do More Harm than Good (part two).  As my experience from that finally lifted I started to have a more positive outlook on life.  Not long after that I began to feel drastically better about life and started to have wishes and dreams for my life again.

As time when on and my birthdays passed I started to see them the way I do now.  I would begin to make small wishes in life and when it came to my birthday wish, I’d make sure it was something simple that would likely come true, like having a day when I didn’t cry or having better blood sugar results, etc.  I wouldn’t wish for big or perfect things (even though I know I’m a perfectionist deep inside) I would just hope and wish for small things to be a little better, that way I knew at some point in the year it was likely to come true.  The next birthday I had I’d wish to get something, something I planned on getting myself anyway, but it was the positivity of that wish and also knowing it would come true, that I wanted to feel again, and knowing the wish would be fulfilled just made me feel better and kept me in a lighter mood.

A Birthday wish does come true!

One thing I always dreamed about and wished for since I was a teenager was to be accepted and liked for who I was, and to find something I’m good at and want to do.  I wished for a career doing what I love and deep inside I knew that I loved to talk (when I’m not feeling shy and could talk about what I was really passionate about) and I wanted to help people.  A part of me also wanted to use my talent(whatever that was) to make people feel happy/entertained.  I didn’t really have any other wish, other than to have my life’s purpose be something I’m passionate about and that helps people…I know, it’s a bit of a weird wish, right?  But it’s what I really wanted to do, I wanted to find a purpose and to no longer feel lost.

Oddly, it took me a long time to realise it, but with blogging I feel like it started to give me me a sense of purpose and the more time I spent blogging my thoughts on various issues, and the more time I spent trying to stay happy and positive, the more I’ve become a happy and positive person and I’ve felt it has given me that sense of purpose I always wanted.  Blogging has led me to feel accepted, I haven’t felt so part of a community in years than I have since blogging and I’ve met some wonderful people who I never would have it I hadn’t started.  Blogging has led me to feel good about my life and I feel, in turn, that I am helping people (even if that help is just showing people which books they might like to read), and maybe, just maybe I’m also entertaining people a little too with my poetry or random thoughts? Whether blogging has done this, or some other things I’ve also tried to keep me feeling positive, the fact is that I feel better than I ever have and it’s a strange feeling too as I feel like a veil of depression I’ve been under for years is finally lifing.  I have days that go up and down, but on the whole I feel very good in my life right now and in some ways I feel like those birthday wishes I made all those years ago to find my purpose, to do something I love…I feel like they’re being answered as I get more and more into this blogging life. 🙂

The more I blog and talk about the things I’m passionate about, the better I feel and the better I get at doing things, both online and in my real-life world too.  I even have ambitions now, real ambitions to start making videos of some of this content and sharing it (and my voice-eek!) online as well as doing other things offline as my confidence in my offline life has improved too!  My birthday isn’t something I dread anymore, and even though I’m a bit older than I wanted to be when I had my whole life sorted out (or should I say beginning to get sorted out-there’s still some way to go!) I now have a positive outlook o my life and it’s because my birthday is another year to look forward to something good happening, to look forward to another great year, to make a wish!  For me it isn’t new year that I get excited about, it’s my birthday, because I know that I can look forward to something good, and if it doesn’t come true in the year ahead, I’ll just put it down to a dream/wish that will take a few more years to come true (like mine teenage ones eventually did!)

Make a wish, it just might come true…

Birthdays should always be celebrated no matter how old you get or how you feel about where you are in life right now.  I used to dread the idea of getting older, maybe not dreading ageing as much as dreading the idea that I wasn’t in some sort of perfect career by a certain age, and dreading being confused lost in life.  But life is never straight forward, and sometimes what you want will only come to you when you are ready. And at other times what you really thought you wanted isn’t something that you do when you are older.  I still believe though that the birthday wish should be a celebrated thing.  It doesn’t matter if you don’t see your wish coming true any time soon.  Wishing is about dreaming and having a dream is something you don’t have when you are suffering from deep depression.  When I was depressed I felt nothing and couldn’t even make a wish, so if you making a wish means you’ll stay positive about something (even something very small), then that’s the reason to make it.

Sometimes wishes really do come true, at other times maybe you should question what you’re really wishing for – is it something you really want or could you wish for something else, but whatever you do, when it’s your birthday make a wish, have a dream, because we never know what will happen in our lives, so why not wish for something amazing…because in the end, we might just get it ❤ 🙂

Have a lovely day everyone and I’ll make one half of my wish today be to share my wonderful feeling of love and positivity with you, I really do wish you all a beautiful and special day too! ❤ 😀

 

Do you make wishes on your birthday?  What dreams or wishes did you make when you were younger and did they come true?  Let me know what you think in the comments below 🙂