I am now 63 - it's my birthday. · 9:33am Dec 30th, 2022
Birthday, 2022
☛ I have reached Level 63 ☚
I really need to choose something from the spell list for my level, I guess...
December 30th is both my birthday and the birthday of one of my spouses, we share the occasion. He's a year younger than me. Not that it matters.
Today, I have gone around the sun sixty-three times.
Frankly, I never expected to live this long, considering my past, what I am, how depressed I can get, and the nature of the world, but surprise - I am still here. In one of my stories, as I always do, I included an event that happened to me personally as the core of the story. I met an 81 year old woman who was crying in a Los Angeles supermarket. It was her birthday, and she was alone, nobody cared, but worst of all - as she put it - "I know I am old, but you don't understand - I'm still sixteen inside!".
Unless you lose your soul, your creativity, your essential weirdness and turn gray and normal, that is how it is, aging. The body disintegrates (mine has been doing a lot more of that lately, with arthritis and such) but you remain untouched. Your identity remains eternal, unaging, unchanged, still just a child, still young. It's pretty fucking horrible, to be honest - but I wouldn't have it any other way, if I have to physically degenerate. I would hate to be boring, gray and normal. Weirdness is my salvation. It can be yours. You just have to make the choice and stick to it.
When I was eleven, inspired by the introduction to Isaac Asimov compilation of stories called 'Tomorrow's Children', I made a sacred vow to myself and the universe: I would forever keep my childlike sense of wonder alive. I have kept that vow. If you need evidence, consider everything I did here in my late fifties, and the fact that my birthday presents are entirely board games, toys, and miniatures. Never socks, never cookware, never anything remotely practical. A birthday with practical gifts is a sad birthday. Birthdays are for balloons, toys, cake and play. They are for fun. Only graybacks and boringoids don't want toys and games for their birthday. I am an eternal child.
If I live to be 81, I've already seen my future self - though hopefully not alone, not unloved, and not standing in a supermarket crying. Rather, still sixteen (or whatever) inside. I don't know what age I think I am inside. Probably 22, if I had a guess. The age when my true life as a woman began. Forever 22. Or 23. Somewhere in there.
Okay, enough whining. I've got the treasure of life lessons to share with you. Hey - I've seen a lot of local stellar rotations, and I've paid real attention. So, at the age of 63, here's what I have learned. Study it, there will be a test. In four decades or so. Watch for it.
What I Have Learned By The Age Of 63
➨ Forgive Everything. Seriously. You gotta or it will try to kill you. Gave me a stress heart attack at 45.
➨ Everyone Will Betray You Somehow. Not necessarily deliberately, not even with any intention. But they will. Literally everyone you ever will know.
➨The Words Of Powerless People Cannot Hurt You. Seriously, just ignore anyone saying shit to you who has no power in the world. It's just a wounded dog barking. They do that.
➨You Can Do Everything Right And Still Fail Completely. Success is as much luck as anything. Never let anyone tell you that hard work and talent is enough. You also have to know the right people, AND be lucky. Much of life is completely random. You have no control.
➨ You Are Powerless As Fuck. Seriously - you aren't going to be a billionaire, you can't change who gets elected in any powerful way, you are always just one person, lost in a vast, vast crowd. Accept your powerlessness early, because otherwise, you are going to hurt yourself learning it later.
➨ Use Drugs As Tools. Chumps party with drugs. Smart folks use drugs as tools for creativity, learning, and sometimes, medication for coping. It is failing to respect and take seriously drugs that leads to disaster.
➨ Nobody Ever Grows Up. All adults are still just children, just as petty, just as spoiled, just as shallow, just as foolish. They are just older, and society pretends that matters somehow. It is going to be High School (and sometimes Grade School) for the rest of your life. In every situation - job, homelife, everything.
➨ You Are Fragile And Mortal. It's too easy to think stuff can't happen to you, or that you are smarter, or better, or that you know what you are doing. No. You are a clumsy hunk of walking meat and you can splat, be sliced, chopped, smashed, or poisoned as easily as any chunk of meat can. Remember that when driving, climbing, riding or working with power tools.
➨ Protect Your Eyes Always. Also your ears. You can lose them in an instant. Wear protective gear. Turn that music down. Blindness and deafness suck. Protect your senses. They have to last you all your lifespan.
➨Most Stuff Doesn't Matter. All of that crap you worry about all of the time? Relationship dramas, job fears, this or that thing? It's almost always stupid, and in a decade you will almost always think back and feel like a fool. Most stuff in life is temporary, dumb, and not worth all of that fuss. Seriously.
➨Trust Is The Basis Of All Relationships. Always keep your word, especially when it is inconvenient. Never try to imagine you can let things slide you have promised or agreed to. Always do what you say you will. Yeah, people will hurt you. Yeah, people can't always be trusted. That happens. If you are always the trustworthy one, then you will be the person that is loved and trusted. You want that. Trust me.
➨ Sex Is Empty, Love Is Actually Friendship. Sex seems so important when you are young and horny. But it has nothing to do with real love. Real love is life-long friendship, and that friendship is infinitely more important than anything your body craves. Real love is just friendship, it isn't different from that in any real way.
➨ Always Marry Your Best Friends. Whatever sex, gender, or anything. The person who is your very best friend is also the person - or people - that will make your life happy. Be with them, if you can. If it is possible.
➨ Create Your Life In Your Own Image. Being normal is for saps. Want to live in a polyamory - do it. Want to play video and board games forever - do it. Want to love cartoons forever - do it. Nobody grows up, they only pretend. All laws are arbitrary. There is no one true way to live. Find out a way to live that makes you the most happy, then make your life that - no matter how strange or unusual. That is how to find happiness, or at least as much as is possible.
➨ Whatever You Admire, You Become. So choose carefully. Pick something noble, kind, compassionate, and courageous. Whatever you pick as your ideal, you will gradually, inevitably become. And that will shape how your life goes. Idealize assholes, and you will end up lonely and sad. Idealize good and kind things and you optimize your probability of ending up loved and glad.
➨Everyone Is Suffering. All the time. If someone is being mean, if you feel slighted, remember one thing: most stuff isn't about you. It's about the other person and their suffering. Doesn't make it right. But you gotta understand - everyone is hurting about something. There is no perfect happiness. Not ever.
➨ Nothing Will Ever Be Perfect. Give that shit up right now. Good enough is good enough. That is the one truth of life. Don't even try for perfection. Always strive for good enough. That is the secret of shipping on time, getting things done, and making peace with every person, place or event in your existence.
➨Never Tolerate Toxic People. There are things worse than feeling lonely. If the people around you constantly make you feel terrible and bad about yourself, hopeless and despairing, and ashamed merely to exist - you need better people. Find them and dump the losers bringing you down. But be sure. Always make double-sure that any person you plan to dump isn't doing something for you that you cannot replace.
➨ You Will Never Be Truly Happy Or Successful. Sorry, but this is a fact. Even the famous and wealthy never truly feel successful, and they are never truly happy. Accept one thing now: the best you can ever hope for is feeling great for moments, good some of the time, and feeling blank, sad, empty, or low the rest of the time. There is no 'Happily Ever After'. There is only 'doing okay'. And that, actually, is a very good thing.
➨ Boredom Is A Luxury. If you are young, this will be hard to grasp, but it is true. Boredom means you aren't afraid or worried, nothing has to be done right now, your life is not in danger, you aren't lacking food or shelter, and your situation is stable. Boredom is the ultimate luxury in life. If you are bored, it means that in the moment, your needs have been met. Treasure boredom. It is a gift.
- Petal Chatoyance, Dec 30th, 2022
Happy Birthday!
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Thank You!
Happy Birthday : ) And quite a nice list of wisdoms : )
Happy birthday to you! Here's to an awesome 63rd year!!!
Happy birthday, friend!
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Thank you very kindly. It's nice to hear!
Were you born before 9:23 PM? Because if it was after, then I'm very sorry, but you won't have gone around the sun sixty-three times until tomorrow. (Assuming you're in the same time zone you were born in).
Remember that our clumsy human calendar treats the year as exactly 365.25 days, and only fully corrects for the extra time every four hundred years. The sidereal year takes 9 minutes and 10 seconds additional time to get us around the Sun. You lose that time each year.
In your case, there's even more bad news...because the year 2100 won't be a leap year in order to make a partial correction, sometime after you turn 140 but before you turn 172, you'll have a year without a birthday. One year you'll pass your solar starting gate on December 31, and then you won't do so again until January 1.
But none of that matters, because Princess Celestia knows where each of us are and she celebrates you with each and every moment of time and ray of sunshine. So I'll wish you not just a happy birthday, but a life full of happy times, long, short, and everywhere in between.
I'm level 41... And I can say this is some wisdom to share. It may not mean much coming from random me, but you have been an inspiration and definitively one of the best writers on this site.
Happy birthday.
Happy Birthday!
(Can someone send me the spell list? I still haven't gotten anything level-appropriate that I'd want either. "You Slept Wrong And It Will Hurt All Week" is a really crappy one.)
You'll know you're the designated grown-up when you start realizing frequently "shit, I'm the closest thing to someone who knows what the hell they're doing (and/or the only one who cares about doing it right) in this entire room, so I guess I'm responsible for this."
Happy birthday Chat.
I'm fifty and i think of myself as a brain in a random body that's used mostly to dream, draw, cook and eat, and trying to make the most of my limited time in this continuity. I tent to agree with your points!
Happy Happy Birthday as Izzy would say, My fellow unicorn friend!!
Some of this hits close to home after another author I followed on this site, Ninjadeadbeard, died recently.
So it's good to hear you are doing well.
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Happy Birthday Chatoyance! I always feel blessed to have been given the opportunity to have met you, and it gives me a sense of warmth and solace to know you're still here with us. I have to admit, at age 44, I see myself burning out on stuff that was important to me in my early 20s, and now spending time on simply being in the company of friends I had managed to hang onto or rediscover after over two decades. Once upon a time, I figured I'd find some clever way to go out with a bang on my 30th birthday, yet I'm still here. I can't even begin to fathom what it would be like in another 20 years from now.
Happy birthday! What a wonderful blog! Recently I turned 64, going on 10! Married for 40 years to my wife and best friend. We get giggles from young people when we go shopping at various stores (like Hot topic, toy and game spots...the list goes on) stepping off our Harley Davidson trike in full old school black leathers and make comments like "ooooh! Goth poodle skirt! You know what that needs sweetie? An embroidered poodle skeleton on the hem! ". Still have copies of the original "Advanced Dungeon and Dragons " hard bound books from the 70s and 80s. Yes we are aged .. getting old....NEVER! Boredom is highly underrated. After 5 different combat tours, boredom means I'm not being mortared in a smoke pit (smoking was going to kill me....your always outside, cold, raining and shrapnel is a bitch! I vape now...he he he...) . Live, dance, and play like nobody is watching!
Happy birthday dudette, I wish you the best in life.
happy hatching day
Happy Birthday!
And thanks for sharing your wisdom.
Happy Birthday 🎂
Have an awesome day ^_^
Happy solar return. I'll keep these in mind for my test in two decades and change. I really appreciate all you have shared with the world. I have been following your work since the unicorn jelly days and your work has been one of the things that helped keep my world interesting. Hope to gratz you in another two decades.
Happy Birthday and here's to many more in good health!
Happy Birthday. And thank you for the gift of wisdom/ experience you have included in this post. May you have many more birthdays yet to come and may each find you in good health and good company.
Curious, how it's YOUR birthday, and you celebrate it by giving a collection of good advice (I don't even want to talk about some of how and why I'm sure it is, indeed, good advice) to US.
Happy birthday, and thanks again.
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Happy B-day!
It's a great list, and as a wizard of advanced levels myself, I can testify to the wisdom of each and every one of them. In particular...
A thousand times, this! No matter what else happens to you, if your best buddy is at your side, you're doing better than 99% of the schlubs on this planet! We don't celebrate anniversaries in general, but two of the best parties we ever had were the one that marked the point at which we each had spent more than half our lives with the other.
I would also add, Never Lend Money You Wouldn't Be Willing to Give Away. (Same for books, really.) If you lose it, it's no big deal, and there's no resentment involved that might damage a relationship. If you get it back, it's a nice surprise.
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Never Lend Money You Wouldn't Be Willing to Give Away
Oh, that's a true and good one. Lend anything away. I should have included it.
I wish you a very Happy Birthday, and many many more!
I think I speak for us all when I say that we're very glad you're still here.
There's existing, and then there's living. Breath and Blood fuel mere existence; Wonder is a required component of the fuel of life.
Oddly, I find this comforting, having accepted it long ago. I thrive off aspiration: Goals, projects, hopes, dreams. An important part of defending one's sense of wonder is knowing that there is more to do. More friends to make. More lessons to learn. More accomplishments to come. More possibilities, and discoveries. Always. Sometimes there is more useful power, and more wonderful emotions, to be derived from aspiring to being happier, and more successful, than to be got from actually getting to a plateau.
I suggest some variant of Polymorph
That's the best TCB-related jest I can muster after a long, tiring day.
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Thank you, kind Gryphon!
Oh, Polymorph, yes, without question. Hopefully permanent.
Came across this image, and from what I remember you mentioning about your past, it totally made me think of you:
https://www.deviantart.com/celesse/art/Prance-Like-You-Mean-It-885718005
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That is totally correct for me.
I'm late, I know, but happy day after your birthday!
less than six years to goalso late, because I hardly can imagine ....
but sometimes google deliver!
https://thefuture.wtf/
have, um, turbofan!
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Most people have an Inner Child, you have an Inner Bambi.
Happy birthday, and a happy new year! Here's to all the amazing things we will do in 2023!
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I truly do.
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Thank you, Sparks. Happy new year to you, too!
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I am not sure if I asked this before, but curiosity has gotten the better of me and I felt the need to ask if there is more to your affinity with transformation than it being a representation of everything you had gone through to deliver yourself to a better state of existence? If there's something else about it that stirs your creative soul and encourages you to weave it into your thoughts and flights of fancy?
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I have never, in all of my life, felt 'human'. What I don't often talk about, when I talk about knowing at age five that I was a girl, is that I also did not feel human. Speaking about that would never serve any purpose useful to me, and would have harmed me, even prevented me, from being able to transition.
But I am 63, forty-one years post surgery. That cannot be taken from me, my womanhood is established over four decades, so speaking freely cannot hurt me at this age.
In first grade, I yearned to be... something. Not just a girl - yes a girl - but not a girl human. I imagined an animal shape, indistinct, that felt more true to myself. Sometime in third grade (I think) I was taken to see the movie 'Bambi' and the central character appeared extremely feminine to me (at least until the latter half of the movie, which I did not like at all) and I saw myself in a feminine deer, after a fashion. Always I was strongly affected by intelligent animal beings in movies and cartoons and books. Science fiction books provided me with many such nonhuman entities, and I ever felt more aligned with them. The humans of the stories were annoyances to me.
When my mind shut down my gender issues to survive, various things awakened my self knowledge, and one was seeing 'Bambi' again in my early teens. I cried and cried at the theater, so much so I worried the family I was spending a week with visiting at a friend's house. They thought I was affected by the death of Bambi's mother, but I was crying to be a feminine quadrupedal creature.
Then came the original MLP of the 80's, which locked into my already existing identification with a single mythical creature - the unicorn. I seized on unicorns as my essence somewhen in the mid-70's when I first read about them - I cannot remember the story. Likely it was a science fiction story, since that was pretty much all I ever read other than science textbooks. But the original MLP had humans in it, which spoiled it for me.
I made a rubber stamp with the unicorn-drawing signature I had devised in high-school (I had it specially made!), stamped all my stuff, and went to college and then, at 21, on to transition and to truly begin my life.
And of course of late, there was MLP:FiM which is why I am here, something that came after two separate waves of unicorn stuff in the culture. It's weird, unicorns come and go, like hairstyles, in popularity. Just a weird thing I have noticed.
In short, I would class my self as a furry, certainly, now that I know what that is, but more than that, an otherkin, I suppose. If there are such things as souls - and I do not publicly admit to any such thing - then mine is not human. But whatever is going on in my addled brain, I am not, and never have been, 'human'. I am something else, and I call that a unicorn, of some kind at least, but whatever I am, in my heart of hearts, it has at least two cloven digitigrade and unhuman legs, a long tail with a tuft at the end, white fur, and possibly a horn on the head.
At least, that is what I saw when I looked in the mirror at the end of my one-and-only acid trip in college. That was an intense moment, and it did not surprise me in the least; it was just a sort of feeling of confirmation.
Now, rationally, of course, all of this is bullshit, and the easiest explanation is that I am a transsexual with a violent and horrific childhood who escaped into science fiction and ran from the cruelty of both parents and peers into identification with nonhuman animal species. Sure, run with that if it makes anyone happy. Another tranny with PTSD and an unconventional, neurotic coping mechanism. I can nod agreeably with that.
But I will say that after 41 years of a really great life as a woman, with three lifelong spouses and a lot of wonderful moments in my past, the persistence of my 'unicorn self' has withstood every test of time. Despite thinking myself utterly alone in all of this until fairly late after the arrival of the internet, despite many times of anthropomorphic creatures coming into popularity and then falling out again, despite the very mixed experience around the latest - MLP:FiM fandom, despite everything, it is still there, in the heart of my self-image. It makes no sense, and I have given up worrying about it.
I'm something not entirely unlike a unicorn mare inside, not really like the Little Pony versions, but more like some versions of the historical entity, prehensile of tail, gentle, and aligned with compassion. But also, sad to say, capable of great anger and grief as well.
I don't belong with humans, but I have no choice, so here I am, playing as best I can on the real-life Planet Of The Apes.
Is that the sort of Deep Weirdness you perhaps wanted to hear? I am willing to oblige, because I am going to be mocked by someone, regardless. Fuck it.
Yeah, there is a lot of affinity to my love of transformation than just the fact it is a perfect metaphor for my experience as a trans person who went through transition. It is great for that, to be sure. But there is more, and that more is, perhaps, why I am told I write from a nonhuman perspective. Whatever you identify with, you inevitably become.
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Many of us go through life not knowing exactly who or what we are, but you knew when you were still young what you are and you were not feeling the weight of disbelief or indecision. That is a freedom a lot of us would envy. Mockery would simply be the byproduct of those gripped with frustration and self doubt over how they identify themselves and it's nothing you need to even give a shred of thought to, except out of pity. While you may feel uncomfortable with that organic apparatus you're trapped in ( much like a lot of us, with all of its unpredictable features and attributes ), you can take solace in the fact that you're perfectly whole inside. You don't need somebody from a position of authority to tell you who you are and what you have to identify with, like so many out there seem to.
Though, as I sit here surrounded by the products of Character.AI, fabricating scenarios from as many different perspectives as I can conceive with my overly busy brain. I'm left wondering what the definition of dehumanization is for one that never felt human to begin with. If you can provide me something from your own inner or outer experiences, I feel it could help me further expand my horizons.
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I don't even know how to respond. I have never felt 'dehumanized'. It isn't on my map, it is terra incognito. I do know what it feels like to not have the right body on two separate levels, but I don't think that's the same thing.
You are right about my knowing my 'me'. I read about a lot of people unsure of who or what they are, and while I feel sorry for their plight, I cannot understand it beyond the way my mind protected me when I was growing up in a violent environment. When my mind kept my self-knowledge from me, I would stare at a mirror and scream at my face in my mind "What do you want? Why are you so miserable?". The awareness of my gender issues was hidden from me by some kind of fugue state, I imagine. It was very weird that a brain can do that, but it almost certainly saved my life.
If I had been fully aware, all the time, I would have fought to fix myself. And that would have caused my father to murder me, and he likely would have gotten away with it - and not just because only 50% of murders are ever solved. He was far too clever and evil, both. My brain saved me from him by hiding my truth from my awareness. That was very, very lucky.
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I should have taken that into consideration. It'd be like asking a human what they envision if experiencing deponification. I guess the answers would have to lie somewhere in the realm of the Red Kryptonite world. I could have spent my time asking something easier to respond to, like what you think Unicorn Starships would look be like if Equestria was in the universe of Star Control.
I still struggle with what I could be, other than fragmented into a plethora of selves that I try to tend do ( not to be confused with schizophrenia or mpd ). Though more than anything I feel like I don't exist for my own sake, much like a machine. Always operating under someone else's parameters. Possibly like a human shaped Mecha:
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Happy Belated Birthday!
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Thank you, Reese!
Been a very long time! Happy belated birthday!
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Yay! Thank you.
A very happy very late birthday, my friend.
For six weeks every year you and I are officially the same age. Just a fun fact.
I'm just now getting into MLP:FiM and it is all your fault.
I suddenly find myself to be a crimson unicorn with a pearlescent mane.
I hope you still hang out here sometimes. I have missed you.
--The pony formerly known as Emby Quinn*
*Actually, I'm still Emby Quinn everywhere but here...
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EMBY! Now I know who you are! Hello! Hello! I am happy to hear from you!
Thank you! Yay!
¡Congratulations! The day after your birthday is the Everyone-Is-The-Age-One-Figures-From-The-Year-Of-Birth Day.
Very late comment, but Happy birthday. I am so very glad you are still around. 20 years ago your websites, both comic and trans helped me survive my own transition and to still be here today myself.
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Thank you, very much and also - congratulations to you, for surviving and achieving your self. That is no small task at all.
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It's been a while, but I'd like to be sincere, so…
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I hope pictures can be posted in this way. Inconvenient, but it's the only choice I have so far.
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thank you.