🌷 Receiving Love: Reflections On My 28th Birthday
A birthday essay about healing, chronic illness, and remembering that love doesn’t need to be earned.
Ah, but I was so much older then
I'm younger than that now
- Bob Dylan
I turned twenty-eight today — or at least, scientifically I did. Emotionally, part of me feels far older, part younger, and all of them somehow alive at once.
There’s the 60-year-old inside me: worried for family and future, gossiping with neighbours, living vicariously through the young while tucked in seclusion with a crossword.
The 40-year-old: a small business-owner, organised, serious, trying to keep things together.
The 23-year-old: frozen in the trauma of the pandemic, the violence of the mob that attacked me, the conflicts that tore my friends apart, and the virus that changed my life forever.
The 18-year-old: partying through the night — lost in drum and bass beats and intoxication, feeling love for the first time and crying in vast landscapes.
The 11-year-old: lonely in a new private school, my mind expanding as my heart quietly sank.
The 8-year-old: a bleach-blond cherub jumping from cliffs into the Mediterranean with a beaming family wrapped around me.
I am all of them and none. Each one speaks in their own tone in my mind, but they meet here — in me, this moment, trying to make peace. I look in the mirror and see myself as an avatar transforming, pixel by pixel, like a computer-game character facing each new level in the great game of life.
On level twenty-eight, I find myself rebuilding slowly from a breakdown. Five years on the rollercoaster of chronic illness have taken their toll. I keep trying new paths — both the well-trodden of medication and the newly emerging of therapy. One numbs, one enlivens. Both feel key, in balance, to my happiness. Yet the cold memories of loneliness and flashing trauma of violence open old wounds that I’m scared I can’t suture. They throb open, the fatigue stopping me from dressing them, and the migraines rebelling in response.
Painting and writing help to liberate the feelings, but I can’t help wondering if I’ve lost my way — if I’m falling by the wayside. My girlfriend says she’s never seen me so sad, but I’m getting better, right?
At this point, I’m learning that the breaking is part of the healing. I surrender to the pain — both physical and emotional — to try to learn what it wants to teach me. Can I befriend this shadow? Can I learn to be compassionate to the 11-year-old who had every material benefit yet cut his own arms? Can I free the 40-year-old workaholic who feels he must prove himself to deserve meaning and friendship? For now, I’m trying to trust the process of healing, even when it’s painful.
Autumn helps. The drizzle of rain mirrors my inner weather; the falling leaves echo my slow unravelling. The warm glow of neighbouring houses offers a quiet sense of community and home.
I curl into the season like a small animal in hibernation — vulnerable yet safe — surrounded by friends who give that extra bit to help me heal. If only I could tame my inner critic enough to receive their love fully. I try to begin again, and again, from the simplest place: love.
Love as self-compassion. Love as survival. Love as an action.
I want my new rotation of the sun to be built on that — on care, not achievement. I want to trust that even in stillness, I am enough. Each day can feel like a new boss battle, but it’s really just different terrain to explore.
This birthday felt like a step in that direction. Rather than hiding in shame or over-performing a version of myself that was distant from my inner world, I opened up and asked for help to make it special. I was too unwell to do the things I usually do — to travel, cook, or clean — so I invited close friends and family to step in. I’m glad I did, because together they created a beautiful evening full of warmth, gifts, and care. The pressure wasn’t all on me, or my partner, or my parents, but shared — like a family preparing Christmas dinner.
It had that familiar taste of home, despite being 440 kilometres from where I was born. There was a nut roast and wellingtons in the oven, two rounds of unique desserts, and homemade gifts — all oozing with the love infused within.
And yet, somewhere deep inside, I felt uncomfortable. It was so strange to simply sit and receive — to be loved without giving anything back. I kept wanting to get up, to help, to contribute, to earn it somehow.
By the end of the night, I cried. Not out of sadness, but because I was so deeply seen and cared for that I didn’t know how to hold it. I define so much of myself in the giving that receiving felt alien. I was my eight-year-old self again — the one who basked in a big family’s love and once floated carefree in warm water, trusting the sea to hold him. It felt beautiful, yet my forty-year-old self mocked my childishness. The thought that small walks and eating out could count as “a big day” was met with scorn and derision in my head. Oh, how hateful I can be to my struggling self sometimes...
Disability has reminded me of the side of love I’d been missing — the side, as a friend wrote in my birthday card, “you forget what you know too well”: the kind that doesn’t need to be earned and that flows even when I’m still. The kind we’re born receiving, yet lose through self-criticism — through believing ourselves unworthy and undeserving of care.
I find it hard to receive that love. It feels like falling backwards, trusting someone will catch me. But I want to practise that trust — to let care in without apology, to remember that receiving is also a gift. It lets others love me back.
Maybe this birthday wasn’t about celebrating what I do, but remembering who I am: loved, held, human.
This is where I begin again — from the quiet innocence of a newborn, who trusts in the people who show up, and in the life that keeps unfolding.
Level twenty-eight unlocked!
Not by grinding, but by remembering the lesson of level one: how to receive love.
Thank you for reading my personal reflections. I hope they can also offer you some solace. Whilst I am recovering from my breakdown of chronic symptoms, I will be posting more on this newsletter, Round Robin, and less on Citizens Assemble. Feel free to unsubscribe if you're not into that.
I just feel a calling to keep writing about my experience. To break down the stigmas of burnout, depression and all else that ails me. To express the silent scream of my suffering. Perhaps another will resonate, and we can recover together.
There will be art, joy and resistance too. But for now, I must reflect on a few shadows before I can see the light again.
