Hello! I’m Logan. This is me thinking through what aging means to me.
Quick Reminders:
The next Adoptee Monthly Meditation is scheduled for July 21st at 1PM PST. Sign up at the bottom.
Aging is as Ironic as a No-Smoking Sign on your Cigarette Break
I am not immune to anxieties around age and social perception. I am easy prey for Buzzfeed clickbait on what trends are “millennial cringe.” At the end of last school term, I accidentally took a picture of a QR code in front of my Gen Z students. “I KNOW HOW QR CODES WORK, OK.” I confess to using “anti-aging” skincare.
When I recently met my beloved queer mindful writing group for the first time in person, I referenced mix tapes, Pop-Up Video, and the best job of my life: working at Blockbuster Video. The youngest of us had no clue what Pop-Up Video was.
My references are too old to be recognizable.
Isn’t that ironic? Don’t you think?
June 21st-28th is my Birthweek
What is a birthday?
The day you were born? The day you celebrate being born?
The Metta Sutta includes this line, frequently used when discussing the Heart Practices.
Just as a mother at the risk of life
loves and protects her child, her only child,
so one should cultivate this boundless love
The language can be difficult for many people who were relinquished by their first parent to hear.
When I told an adoptee friend I did not know my “actual” birthday, the texted response shamed my bio mom: “cant remember her kid's birthday that's BAD.”
Resentment toward birth mothers of color is extremely common, despite patriarchal cultures, sexist economies, and millennia of political inequity. Biological fathers are rarely denigrated as much. Mine doesn’t recall my date of birth either, only that his unilateral decision to relinquish me, a “curse,” was done “on sight.”
My response: “Thanks, it's a weird thing. But yeah, I really don't blame or shame her at all. She's a really good and kind person. Her telling me that my birthday was wrong was, I think, an attempt to care for me.”
Or to care for herself, to honor whatever actually happened to my birth mother on June 28th, 1984, the day definitely not my birthday. Either way, compassion feels appropriate. Because we do try, don’t we? Even if it comes out in peculiar ways.
My own response to no one remembering my birth was to claim seven days. A birth week. It’s, like, Biblical.
The Other Side of the Hill
In my own life, care emerges to follow Mary Stancavage’s advice and “keep softening.” Softening is how I want to cultivate that boundless love from the Metta sutta, mothered protection or not. I want to let things be more. I want to let myself be.
At this exact point in my adoptive mother’s life, my step-dad surprised her with a ten-foot-tall sign in our front yard that said, “Lordy, Lordy, look who’s 40! Happy Birthday!”
This kicked off one of many epic fights. In this vein, my adoptive mother taught me image must be protected at all costs. The sign needed to be removed ASAP, though it was meant to stay up for a few days. Phone calls were made. The sign was removed. Age was something to evade and obscure to the point of screaming and crying.
My legal birthday happened two days after the sign event. I have no idea what happened, or if it was celebrated. I just knew how shameful it was to get older.
Many years later, in 2023, I found myself in a program called A Year to Live, run by Vinny Ferraro, Zen Hospice and Metta Institute founder and author of The Five Invitations Frank Ostaseski, and Pam Dunn.
Based on Stephen Levine’s book of the same name, the program begins with the prompt that we were given a terminal diagnosis and had one year to live. The practice is to think through dying and grief as a group. Through the year, homework included writing a will and deciding on medical directives.
Among the first practices was to start a countdown. 365 days left. 364 days. 363. What would you do, if you knew you only had 362 days left to live? What would be most important?
Another practice I maintained was writing down the remembrances every day.
Days will go by and then suddenly, “Everyone and everything I love will be taken from me” will land in a different way. It is a reminder to slow down and appreciate. To really feel my cat Portman, perching on on my belly to stick his face directly between me and the tv, purring and lolling against my body. Pay attention to me.
Pay attention to the time we have now.
Becoming Pro-Fragility
This week, “I am of the nature to grow old, get sick, and die,” is hitting hard, as I consider what being “over the hill” means, what a shit show that June 27th debate was, and the polycrisis. For those unfamiliar, I use this term to reference the interconnected set of global challenges we face, including climate change, resource depletion, social inequity, and more.
Early iterations of this post included lots of links and references for polycrisis research. But I’ll just say: It isn’t just one thing, like just the water crisis, and it’s not a conspiracy, and oh my god. I cannot believe these are our presidential candidates.
In this age of denied grief and constant urgency, care is the deep work. Love, looking for joy, reclaiming our bodies, reclaiming our time, is revolutionary. Forgive everyone everything and take no shit.
Earlier iterations of this included a statement of forgiveness and rehardened boundaries between myself and my adoptive mother. I casually included my city commendation subsequent to leaving her home, for work benefitting survivors of sexual assault and domestic violence. It was a fairly obnoxious humble brag about, among other things, my “sex ed” programming, where I hired speakers to teach undergraduates about feeling okay with and asking for (and saying no to) sex. I wanted to show the stickiness of ego despite evolution.
But then I saw the debate. Seeing the presidential candidates and this draft in split screen reminded me A) my readers understand the stickiness of ego and B) politics is just a way of organizing people. And love organizes the most intimate of social units.
I want to live in a world where care, not capital, is the organizing principle. I want compassion to inform the way we think about age, dying, sickness, the planet.
But I’m not the president. I’m just one aging hippy. So I can only live “as if,” as play scholar Johan Huizinga might say. I will live as if love does matter.
I don’t know if I have a decades to live, a year, a month….but the only things I will ever own are my actions. Figuring out how to do this whole “boundless love” thing, excluding none (including me) will be my practice.
Moment to moment.
And even if we do not agree, even if you don’t know Pop-Up Video, therefore have no clue how many times VH1 played “Iris” by the Goo Goo Dolls, we belong to each other.
We are fragile. No matter our age.
What it All Comes Down to, my Friends
I have two birthweek wishes.
First (here’s my Jeb! moment), please scroll all the way down and click the heart button.
Second, listen to a song you used to sing but haven’t heard in a while. Give yourself that joy. If you need help, I offer this one. It is, apparently, an “oldie” now, but come on, how fun is singing “pi-AN-no”?
And what it all comes down to
Is that I haven't got it all figured out just yet
'Cause I've got one hand in my pocket
And the other one is givin' a peace sign
Takeaway Practice
Everyday Mindfulness
I think it’s silly to celebrate your birth on only one day of the year or special holidays.
What can you do today that honors your life? What can you do today to honor the life of someone else? Someone gone?
Sit and breathe with the prompt. Let it percolate.
Upcoming Dates
The Adoptee and Foster Care Alumni Monthly Meditation is scheduled for July 21st at 1PM PST. We’ll have a ~20-minute guided meditation, a short talk with some journaling or dialogic practice (small groups), and then Q/A for about 60 minutes total. If you are interested, please sign up here. The link will be sent out the day before we meet. It’s free to join but restricted to adoptees and foster care alumni.
One participant from the last session said their takeaway was “To embrace myself instead of focusing on change - to stop being a chameleon and meeting other people's needs, but to meet my own.”
Recommended Reads From the Past Couple Weeks
- ’s “Epitaph” is a beautiful piece in dedication to her late cat, Scamp.
- ’s “The story of Jonathan and David is SO GAY I’m surprised the Far-Right isn’t trying to ban the Bible from public schools” is well-written, thought-provoking, hilarious, and kind.
- ’s “Missing Praises When Adoptees Move Mountains” is a concise primer on adoptee grief.
- ’s “I Could Care Less, Pt. 1” is a wonderful consideration of the word “care.” I’m looking forward to part 2.
- ’s “The Body in the Age of the Polycrisis” reminds us that “pouring attention into the body is a revolutionary act.”
Bio and Coaching Info
Logan Juliano, PhD (they/them) writes this here Substack and mentors via Light Hive Integration. The website has been in development for a while, so if you’re interested in private mentoring, you can reach me at Logan@lighthiveintegration.org.
Thank you for writing this! My 40th birthday is just around the corner and I’ve been counting down the days with 40 days of joyful moments; this makes me feel like I’m not doing it completely wrong. I love the invitation to listen to music of my youth - I’m going to add that as a planned joyful moment for tomorrow.
Logan, what a lovely piece. So much to think about. Belated birthday greetings. 40 set me free in a lot of ways. I found it easier to speak my mind and shake off my own inhibitions.
Your post made me smile - the other day a (much younger) friend called. My phone didn’t ring. When he finally got through he said, “I’ll help you check your settings to figure out what’s happening.” 😂