The History of Birthdays
and starting new things
Hi, It’s me. Thanks again for being an early subscriber and helping me work out the kinks. Last week I created a custom button that said “Join the Conversation” rather than the standard “comment” text and… I messed up the link and nobody could comment. 🤸🏼♀️ Telling myself it’s fine because it wasn’t the real newsletter is just a mind game OBVIOUSLY. Thanks for being part of the charade.
Next week is my birthday, but I won’t be doing anything too crazy. Last year my friend and I both turned 50 within a few weeks of each other. We did a big shindig together that involved people we love and food and merry libations, but also planning and logistics and COVID superspreader anxiety with a side of we-ain’t-thirty-anymore-so-what-were-we-thinking. The party was a really great time, but we made each other promise to never do anything like that again. 🤣
The year I turned thirty, I attempted to throw a dance party. Theoretically, the energy level needed to plan this party matched my actual age, but the problem was, I have *always* been a 50 year old woman on the inside. I am an introverted, homebody, not-cool person who thought her husband’s office would make a great location for a fun dance party! Bryan and I had been married for only two months at that point (together for a total of seven or eight months), so the Big Event Energy we have today wasn’t yet fully developed. I don’t remember a whole lot of dancing, likely because offices don’t really have a dancing vibe.
At some point - I don’t remember when, but I was older than 30 - I realized that I have my own birthday song!
September by Earth, Wind, & Fire, is a song about the nostalgia of falling in love and all the feels that accompany that phase when nothing else seems to matter except each other. The protagonist is reminding his lover that their love is still as strong as ever, even in December – which I believe is a metaphor for the passage of time through a weighty world.
It’s a groovy song. It makes me want to sway and bounce a little, and maybe do that white girl finger-pointy shoulder-shruggy thing. Whenever I hear it, I can’t help but close my eyes and reminisce about my own relationships that have withstood the test of time - in both love and friendship.
This is the headspace in which I usually find myself on my birthday – one that is celebrating the forward motion of new things and also feeling deeply appreciative and reminiscent about all the things that came before.
I was born on the 21st night of September in 1971.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve looked forward to my birthday more than I look forward to Christmas or summer. Whether in Minnesota where I grew up, or here in Seattle, the air is always cool and crisp on my birthday, and dried leaves make a particular tickity tickity sound as they blow end over end down the street.
I get to wear socks again, and dig my boots out from the back of the closet, and light candles. In the 80s I loved wearing my corduroy skirt, fuzzy tights, and clogs. In the 90s, I would buy new lipsticks in dark colors with names like Black Cherry and Raisin Rage.
September is the best. Everything is tilting back toward the darkest night of the year, and I am buzzing with the anticipation of a cozy, reclusive winter.
I moved across the country on the 21st night of September in 1990.
On the day I turned nineteen, I moved away from home for what turned out to be forever. I came to Seattle from Minnesota with two suitcases and a box, wearing flats, a red plaid skirt, a green turtleneck, and a wide white headband in my perfectly bobbed hair. I carried everything that was important to me across the country and set it up in my cinder block walled college dorm room. I was terrified because there were no screens on my windows, and I had grown up joking about how mosquitoes are the Minnesota state bird. I didn’t know that in Seattle, mosquitoes were not urban dwellers.
I was awake for the first 36 hours after I arrived - couldn’t sleep. I remember laying in bed those first few mornings and hearing the sound of sea planes flying over campus to land on Lake Union. Despite coming from the Land of 10,000 Lakes, I’d never heard the sound of a seaplane before, and that week it really sunk in that everything about my life had changed.
Some of my closest friends today – women for whom I would hide a body – I met on the 21st night of September in 1990. It’s a day that holds a significant before and after time stamp in my personal story. There is a Before Seattle and After Seattle - my B.C. and A.D.
I launched a business on the 21st night of September in 2011.
On the morning of my 40th birthday, Bryan woke me with a kiss, handed me a mug, and said, “Your coffee, Mrs. President. Happy Birthday.” And it’s true. I had just become the President and CEO of my own company. It was called What Now? Exactly! and we made animated videos that explained complex products, ideas, and technology in simple, easy-to-understand language.
I’ve heard it said that the learning curve of starting a business is similar to getting an MBA. I don’t have an MBA so I can’t really compare, but I do know this: the skills I picked up doing this work and wearing all the hats a small business partner wears has been invaluable. Doing this thing opened doors and led to conversations and (eventually) gave me a confidence I couldn't have imagined. At the time I felt like a nobody. I was a fraud, and I could name ten people who were better at it than I was. When we finally closed the business, I was relieved it was over. I felt like a failure.
Years later I see the fruits of that experience and appreciate what I learned in that season.
I am starting to write again on the 21st night of September in 2022.
I’m using the occasion of my birthday (next week!) to officially launch Jen Zug Writes! A long time ago I used to write online about my life. My kids were little, I was depressed and overwhelmed, and the blog was funny but also kind of dark. That project was a series of shitty first drafts by design – a way to find my writing voice and practice being brave.
I have my shit together now, and I don’t want this space to be shitty first drafts. I’m excited to share stories with you about love, friendship, business, confidence, making a difference, setting boundaries, letting go, saying yes, being enough, needing more, quitting, persevering, and so on.
I’m also nervous. And I’m terrified of floundering and presuming anything I have to say is important or useful or even that interesting. But I’m taking a step to do another brave thing on my birthday in the spirit of embracing new things while holding deep appreciation for all the things that came before.
I hope you’ll join me. And, please, bring a friend along next week. The more, the merrier!
Until next time,
Jen
Question of the Week
What story or memory from your past are you frequently drawn to as a defining moment? I’d love to hear about it in the comments!
p.s. In case I broke the button link again, use this link from your email to visit the post online.
What pops to my mind is snowboarding lessons 18 years ago. For reasons I can't explain I signed my son and husband up for snowboarding lessons and then decided I didn't want to be home alone so I signed myself up. In January. In Minnesota. At night. I show up week one, get my foot locked into a flex position in the boots, walk out into the negative 10 degree weather they had predicted for every lesson the whole month, and proceeded to repeatedly catch the edge of the board and throw myself down on my back and hit my head (because they didn't require or suggest helmets at the time) John and I both literally gave ourselves whiplash and could not lift our heads off the pillow to kiss goodnight that month. Our son was sent off with the other fast learning, flexible kids and we were the old person class which consisted of us and one other dad. Our instructor was nice but after 30 minutes of our 2 hour class I was cold, couldn't feel my toes, my legs hurt from being stuck in position and I was done. So I went into the warming house for an hour. Finally I decided I paid for them so I should drag myself back out there. I'm a glutton for punishment when I have paid money. I had regained feeling in my toes and my shin muscles had stopped screaming at me so what the heck. When I went back out there the instructor told me he didn't think he would ever see me again. And somehow knowing I had exceeded his expectation I now felt determined to continue to do so. With the bar set so low that I could impress him by just showing up I knew it wouldn't be hard to be a class star. The second week I only sat in the warming house for 45 minutes. The third week I made it through the whole lesson and the last week it was actually a balmy 10 degrees above zero and I made it all the way down the hill without wiping out. I have been on a snowboard exactly one time since those lessons but, it was the moment in my life where I started thinking I could be more, could push beyond my doubts and other peoples expectations. It was the start of a whole new me.
This is not exactly a response to your prompt, but it made me think hard about birthdays. On my 25th birthday I put a large, blank piece of paper on the wall and had my friends write things I should accomplish before I turned 30. Some were funny, some were very pointed, all were "me" in some way. I'm now 37, and two of the (rather small number of) people who wrote things on that list have since died. I think about this all the time. Tom told me to write a 25 page refutation of my favorite book (Atlas Shrugged), which I still haven't done, but I did dedicate my first book to him - and with the launch of my second book this week, he weighs heavily on my mind. (Tom's Twitter bio was: "I hope I consume more than I create." I'm trying, Tom. <3) Alex's was "kill an animal, eat it, and make it into a hat." At the time, I did not know that one day I would be killing *her* chickens and eating them and making them into a hat, because dag-nabbit somebody had to do it after she was gone. So I guess birthdays for me now are more of a reminder to make sure my bucket list is empty. (I type this from a tube in the sky en route to Denver, where I am tackling one of the only two things left on my bucket lit: see a show at Red Rocks!)
I love the dance party at Bryan's office so, so much.