The Morning Reflections of a Birthday Bugbear

Happy(?) Birthday to Me

My dear bugbears, I turn 45 today.

To be sure, that number comes with a certain amount of trepidation, particularly for a an American bugbear like me in a time of fascist witch hunting.

That being said, I must admit—at some risk to my reputation as a morose, morbid, broody individual—that I am, more or less, happy. Please don’t tell anyone. Astrology is, of course, hokum, but I have always been a stereotypical cancer, and it seems hardly befitting to change that at this age.

As longtime readers are undoubtedly aware, I have a finely calibrated bullshit detector and am allergic to toxic positivity in all forms. I have never subscribed to a “no regrets” philosophy. To be sure, I have learned over time that it does not do to dwell on regrets for lengthy periods. That’s the sort of thing a broody person does in their teens and twenties; at my age I hardly have the energy reserves. It’s pablum, but also a truism in this case precisely because it’s true—we must, eventually, come round to accepting the things we cannot change. If a 25-year-old broody bugbear can indulge in long periods of beautiful melancholy, a 45-year-old broody bugbear must develop a certain degree of stoicism.

Image by Angèle Kamp, via Unsplash. Cropped by the birthday bugbear.

That being said, I see a distinction between accepting the consequences of the choices one has made over the course of a bizarre life trajectory like mine, and having no regrets. I have to concede—and I think this is likely universal, or nearly so, among humans, if we’re being honest—that if I had known how everything would turn out based on certain choices I’ve made, I would have made different choices.

For example, had I known that there would be no tenure-track job waiting for me after earning a PhD in modern Russian history from Stanford University, I would likely not have gone to grad school in the humanities, and perhaps not at all. It is difficult to be one of the academy’s throwaway PhDs, being trained for a job—that comfortably middle-class tenure-track professorship—that it turns out you can’t have. And deep knowledge of Russian language, culture, and history, is also specifically a somewhat depressing thing to possess at the moment, although I still love classic rebellious Russian rock. Long live Yuri Shevchuk and DDT! But you know, if I had studied Spain, perhaps, or Japan… Well, the grass is always greener, isn’t it?

Even so, readers familiar with me and my work will recall that I am from Indiana, and Hoosiers are—apologies for mixing my metaphors here—the hobbits of America. So much so that, every time my undergraduate alma mater’s marching band is referred to as The Pride of Mid-America, I somehow expect the phrase to come out as “The Pride of Middle Earth” and feel slight disappointment when it doesn’t.

In Indiana, for example, when your fellow Hoosiers find out you’ve studied foreign languages and the history of foreign places to an advanced degree, they say something like, “That’s different”—in the native Midwestern idiom this is a devastating insult—or, more charitably, “Oh, you must want to work for the State Department.” When they find out you’re writing a doctoral dissertation on the ideology of apocalyptic Christian Russian intellectuals, they ask you things like, “Does your research speak to the question of whether Russia is Gog or Magog?” In the fast-approaching apocalypse, they mean, being literal-minded evangelical Protestants.

Growing up, I always felt different—turns out that was because I was transgender and, being raised in a right-wing evangelical enclave, I became repressed and had no way to conceptualize that until I was an adult. That sense of difference led me to live in my head, becoming quite cerebral and insatiably curious at a young age. That, my friends, is how you end up becoming a Hoosier/hobbit who goes on adventures that take you far away from the shire to spend long periods of time in places like provincial Russia, Silicon Valley (turns out it’s under the control of Mordor), Moscow, Russia, and Tampa, Florida. And now the Pacific Northwest, in an area that is more or less an elven enclave.

A boring life would have been much easier, and in the aggregate probably more pleasant. But it wasn’t my destiny to have a boring life. One way or another, the times we’re living through now would have seen to that, and, to channel my inner Gandalf for a moment, we don’t get to choose the times we live in, but only how we will meet them.

All that aside, today I am happy. The feeling is rusty from lack of use, but it’s clearly happiness. I find myself having just completed a move into a new, nicer apartment (with a much better kitchen), and living with a chosen family I love, and getting by despite all the horrors currently underway in the United States and the wider world. My relationship with my blood family has complicated aspects, but I am grateful that my relationship with my parents is pretty good now. And when contentment sneaks up on me, I no longer tell myself that I have no right to experience it because other people are suffering. Of course, I want to do what I can to reduce suffering in the world, but it’s still okay to enjoy things. You’ll wear yourself out thinking otherwise.

And so, on this, my eleventy-first birthday—okay, forty-fifth, but sometimes it feels like eleventy-one—I sincerely wish you all well. I do not love the Fourth of July because I cannot love a country that despises me, but I hope you all find ways to enjoy the coming holiday weekend. But if there are any Tooks out there planning to shoot off fireworks willy-nilly for hours or days at a time, goddammit it, don’t. You’re traumatizing the poor dogs.

Now get off my lawn.

The Bugbear Dispatch extends a special thanks to our founding subscribers Jody, Ryan Boren, Katie in Seattle, Kel, Roslyn Reid, Rob B. and anonymous for their generous financial support of this publication.