on birth months and stubbornly romanticizing the hard times

It's my birth month, and I am doing my damnedest to romanticize it. You can't stop me.

I have always loved my birthday. My queerplatonic partner (hereafter referred to as my quip) also loves her birthday. When I moved in with her, I learned about her habit of drawing the celebration out for the whole month. "Birth month" comes up more than "birthday" in our house. And I love that. Why pack all of the birthday goodness into one day and put all your hopes on that day going well when instead you can spread it out in little ways across the month? So that's what I do, too.

The problem is my birthday falls on February, one of the least pleasant months of the year. Here in Minnesota, February means severe cold snaps, gray skies, and the threat of cold and flu right around the corner. This February has been especially rough. Actually, this...winter has been kind of rough.

To back up, I have spent the past eight years of my life as a freelance copywriter. It's a job I've loved - I loved the freedom of it, I loved writing for a living, and I have clients that I've worked with for the entire time that I wouldn't trade for anything. Unfortunately, in the past few years, work has been growing slimmer and slimmer. AI has become more the norm, especially in the SEO and web content space. (Even today, when I pulled up this blog to be posted on my author website, Wix asked me if I wanted to use AI to write my blog. The "Content AI" button in the top left-hand corner looms, mocking me.) AI can't do what I can do, what any human writer can do, but business owners who want cheap and easy SEO don't really care. Why hire a human blogger and wait for them to finish a high quality blog if you can have chatGPT write one for you for free in seconds?

So the quip and I have been...struggling. Most months for the past three years, we've had to ask my Dad to pitch in so that we can cover our rent. But this year has reached new lows. By January, I had almost no freelance work to speak of. Grocery runs became fewer and farther between.

I finally had to throw in the towel: I need to get out of the freelance writing game and to find another job. This is not an easy feat as someone with no college degree and no in-office experience in the past eight years, not to mention a disability that makes me unable to stand for hours at a time as one would have to for retail jobs. But I have to find something quick or, quite frankly, we won't be able to continue living where we do now.

And that sucks. It's bad enough having to give up the career I built up for myself. Potentially having to say goodbye to my friends and the life I've made for myself here...I feel stressed and frustrated, and depressed when I linger on it too much. I've put in nearly a hundred job applications this month, had a handful of interviews, but as of today, no job offers. At one point, I spent most of the week sick with a cold because I got stuck waiting fifteen minutes in the cold for a bus, underdressed because I had opted not to wear my worn down but warmer leather jacket and instead go for the more professional-looking trenchcoat.

So yeah. Hard times.

Except it's also one of the best months I've had in a while. Typing that out, even I have a hard time justifying the two. But on January 31st, I sat down and decided, "Unemployment sucks, but February is first and foremost my BIRTH MONTH and I'm going to enjoy it." I made a list of things I wanted to do this month. I showed it to my quip and said, "You don't have to join me for everything if you don't feel up for it, but this is what I will be doing this month." They were all little things, things I could do for little to no money and in a day. Dancing around to my records, having a movie marathon of my favorite movies, making a candle for myself out of the scents I have at home, etc. My quip has big birthday plans for us, and I filled in the rest of the month with little things to help me see February in a softer, more romanticized light.

I also told her and my other friends that I was going to approach the job hunt with the assumption that I would find something. That if I put in enough applications, the right job would come through in the nick of time and we wouldn't have to leave. "If I don't do that," I explained, "I'll start to despair, and I'll just give up and stop putting in applications." That delusional positivity has been tested as we move further into the month with no results, but I'm determined to stick to it. It changes the feeling of job hunting. Every application and scheduled interview feels like a part of a montage where the plucky heroine continues pushing against the odds until she finally meets her goals.

It sounds silly. I'm turning 34 this month, and I'm told that birthdays aren't supposed to matter as much by that point. I'm told that I'm too old to be delusional or to picture myself as a plucky heroine in an adventure story. But you know what? It's working. I feel genuinely happy and grateful for February this year. And celebrating myself in little ways has kept me from falling into the patterns of low-self esteem that I often hit when dealing with instability in my personal life. I'm having a really good time, in a really bad month.

I'm not saying I haven't had low points. Missing out on seeing my favorite musical again because I was sick when the long-awaited day came around was definitely a bummer. Not having a job yet is less than ideal. Overall, though, I wake up looking forward to another day in my birth month and determined to keep on the job hunt. Because I decided this is going to be a good month, and by God, it is going to be one. It already is one.

I know that sometimes people caution against "romanticizing," but I think that's only because "romanticism" tends to get conflated with emotional avoidance. If you only look at the nice, romantic parts of your life and avoid your reality, then sure, that could end up blowing up in your face. Emotional avoidance is an extremely harmful practice of forcing yourself not to face negative emotions or situations, thus making yourself unable to navigate difficult emotions. But that's not what I'm doing.

I make no pretenses about the fact that there are a lot of bad things happening this month. In my personal life and in the larger world. I feel those feelings, and I try not to shy away from them. But I don't want them to overshadow all the good things about this month. In 2024, I had a habit of focusing too much on all the stressors and terrible things happening. This February, I'm just shifting my attention and finally giving some appreciation to the good things I have going on. My lovely friends, my creative outlets, the time I have to pursue my hobbies right now while I look for a new job. Even a chance to reevaluate what I want from my life.

Romanticizing your life looks different to everyone. Because I'm a storyteller, romanticizing to me means treating the hard parts like they're all part of the story. The protagonist has to have their dark night of the soul before they're able to save the day. It's an opportunity for growth, and eventually it will work out. And sure, that's delusional, but I don't think it's the harmful kind of delusion. I know realistically that it might not work out, and I could end up in a worse situation. I'm simply choosing to act as though things will work out, and then putting in the effort that I know it will take for things to work out. If they don't, I'll give myself time to grieve and then I'll start romanticizing the next steps.

It's a stubborn sort of romanticism, and the kind that suits me best, I think. I know that the world outside is gray and harsh, and I'm telling it no. You're not going to make me gray and harsh. I'm putting my own filter on things, and I'm going to enjoy myself and you can keep up or not. I think that's my best birth month present to myself this year, something I hope to carry forward into future years.