I never thought I'd be the sort of person who didn't look forward to their birthday. The very notion of this would have seemed laughable to my younger self. I was always excited by the prospect of growing another year older and marking the event by celebrating with my family and friends.

And yet, here we are.

Today I'm turning 32. Not exactly a milestone year, but I would have expected to have even a modicum of excitement for the event.

Instead, I have been watching the days count down with a feeling of impending dread.

When sitting down to write this, I realized that I haven't written anything here this whole year. That feels pretty bad. Awful, in fact.

I also have not written much in my journal. In comparison to 2025, my entries for this year are incredibly sparse. January started off okay, February saw a decline, and in the subsequent months I was lucky if I managed one entry a month.

This lack of writing, in turn, leads to these marked gaps in my memory. I sit here—64% of the way through the year—looking back, and I cannot recall what I was doing or how I was feeling during it.

I surmise that this contributes to that feeling of dread; that time is flowing onwards, I'm another year older, but feel like I have nothing to show for it.

Over the summer, Heather and I have been reading through The Lord of the Rings. I have not read the books since I was eleven or twelve, so I was curious to see how my perspective on them would change while reading them as an adult.

The Fellowship of the Ring starts with a foreword from Tolkien. Whether I read this as a child, I do not recall. It certainly did not stick with me at the time, if so. More likely than not I skipped over it to get to the actual story.

While reading through it this time around, this particular section stood out to me:

One has indeed personally to come under the shadow of war to feel fully its oppression; but as the years go by it seems now often forgotten that to be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years. By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead.

Reading the last sentence had my jaw on the floor. The matter-of-factness with which he states "all but one of my close friends were dead" caught me off guard.

The tumult and grief I feel in my own life—which feel so overwhelming in the moment—pale at the thought of losing all but one of my dearest friends to the Great War. Not to say that my own emotions should be invalidated by comparison, but it did make me re-examine my perspective.

I was talking to my therapist recently about how I often struggle with the disconnect between how I'm feeling and how my brain tells me I "ought" to be feeling. Her response to me was to "feel what you feel."

That is, to allow myself to feel what I'm feeling in a given moment. No judgment, no analysis, no poking at my innermost thoughts to try to uncover the reason for it. Just feel and acknowledge the emotions as I feel them.

Normally I would try to end a downer of a post such as this with some optimistic wrap-up, out of an obligation to be perceived as relentlessly positive online. This time I choose to acknowledge how I'm feeling and leave it at that.

Today I'm turning 32, and I feel sad.