I cut my hair short today. It seemed like something needed to change, or at least needed to mark the beginning of the 40th year of my life.

Yesterday was my 39th birthday. In the past I haven't been a huge fan of my birthday. It may have something to do with the fact that it is so close to Christmas that it often got mushed in with the rest of the holiday. As an adult though, I think it has had more to do with the reality that birthdays mark the gap between my reality and what I thought my life would look like. So I used to avoid them, critique them, downplay them...

Almost three years ago when my friend Liz was in the last few months of her battle with breast cancer I made a sarcastic comment about not wanting to get old. To that she responded that she would give anything to have another birthday, to get old, to be there for her boys birthdays...so I just needed to be grateful for the chance to get old. I can still her. Even almost two and half years after her death, I can still hear her every time I start to complain about getting old, to mourn what my life isn't.

So I am thinking about how I want to mark this year, how I will celebrate getting old! In honor of my friend Liz. In honor of my brother. Even if it doesn't look the way I expected it to and even hoped it would.

Yesterday I went to therapy in the morning. Yes, you read that correctly - I spent the morning of my birthday with my therapist! (As you read this you are probably either thinking I am crazy or you can totally relate!) He asked me what a healthy life for me would look like. As I was leaving his office he stopped to remind me what a good question he thought that was - and that while he didn't know what that would like he was pretty sure it would be courageous and vulnerable and boundary-setting for me. That's right, I pay a guy to tell me I'm going to have to do what I really don't want to do, feel entirely exposed while doing it and have to renegotiate the terms of the relationships that are most important to me...I am quite certain that I don't have any idea yet what that is going to look like.

And in a flash I am right back at both/and. A year full of disequilibrium and fear and liberation and hope all at once...