Things I Love Thursday - Birthday Edition

I'm not going to lie, I freaking love my birthday. I got donuts for breakfast. Time was, I stopped at Dunkin' Donuts every morning on my way to work and got donuts and hash browns, at this time I also gained over 30 pounds so I've only been picking up iced tea there in the mornings on my way to work. Today, though, I got the donuts and they were delicious. In the afternoon I went to a spa for a two-hour pampering package. I purchased a Groupon for the Durham Wellness Spa and I had a half-hour in the infrared sauna, a half-hour of accupressure therapy, and an hour of herbal salt scrub body treatment, it was so relaxing. To top it all off, I'm going to dinner at Red Lobster with several of the girls from school. I have been craving Red Lobster for a good six months and it's one of those things I would never do by myself. I love having this kind of splurge day and feeling like I really deserve it. I don't spoil myself particularly often. Above all that, though, I adore the outpouring of love I am swamped with on my birthday. A large part of the time, I feel incredibly invisible. I've been sat on by people on the bus who somehow didn't see me there, people have cut in front of me in line because they didn't notice me, when pictures of events I attended get posted I always seem to be standing just out of frame, in the decades I did theatre I almost never got mentioned in a review, when family members mention the people who are talented/smart/going somewhere I'm never the first person they think of, and in a graduation speech, a girl mentioned nearly every person in our 55 person class except me. I constantly struggle at believing I'm relevant and now, being so far away from my home and the people I care about most, I often wonder if anyone even notices my absence. And every year on my birthday, I am reminded that those feelings of insignificance are my own issue and there are literally hundreds of people from every point in my life that notice and care.