It’s never too late to have that birthday cupcake

To celebrate our 62nd birthdays, my best friend and I recently spent the weekend in Disneyland. Despite creaky knees and stiff backs, we were ready to party like … well, like eight-year-olds.

We had great fun on the (not-too-wild) rides and enjoyed being playful and somewhat silly. But in that space of awareness about our childhoods, what arose in both of us were memories of disappointing birthdays of the past. 

For me, it was 1963, the year I turned eight. My mother was supposed to bring chocolate cupcakes to my third-grade class at the end of the school day.

But a few days before my birthday, President John F. Kennedy was shot. Guess what day his funeral was? That’s right. My birthday. No school, no cupcakes, no party. I was too young to understand why everything shut down that day. All I knew was that my birthday was ruined, and I was devastated.

Disneyland was my cupcake

So at age 62, Disneyland was my cupcake. I screamed like an eight-year-old on the roller coaster. I ate the ears off more than one Mickey Mouse confection. I even climbed aboard a few kiddie rides with my BFF, who found a way to heal her own birthday traumas, too. 

When the weekend was over, we declared it all complete. We’d both had the best birthday EVER in the Happiest Place on Earth. 

You can heal that stuff through writing, too

Sometimes it takes putting your story down on paper to see how you can heal things from the past. Writing helps us bring ourselves current. We write a story about some part of our lives, and then we see how we’ve grown — not only since that time, but maybe even because of it. Writing helps us illuminate the dark places. It helps us bloom into greater self-awareness and self-acceptance. And it helps us make sense of our lives: how we got to here from there.

What are you ready to heal?

I’d love to hear from you.

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