On my birthday, I wrote a poem that made my friends and family uncomfortable. “Your birthday poem stressed me out.” And “Oh… read it for me again. It’s so sad.” I tried explaining what it was supposed to be about. It’s about how we look to our past selves for confirmation of who we are and only sometimes get it.

Recently, I was going through my Google Drive, which is linked to the first email account I ever made in the 2000s. I found a middle school English class assignment titled “Writing Reflection.” This particular past-self search for confirmation of who I really am did yield a comforting result: I always loved the mystery of my own poetry.

Eighth-grade me typed in her Google Doc, “I don’t focus on rhyming or keep track of even what the poem is about. I write my feelings and my thoughts down. It is rare that I ever title a poem before I write it because how can you know for sure what your poem will be about until you’ve finished it?”

“Birthday Poem” began in the music. I didn’t set out to write a poem about turning twenty-eight or about the dysphoria of looking at younger versions of yourself and not recognizing them as your own. On a quiet birthday in the mountains of North Georgia, I sat before an open Notes app and plucked out a little melody as it came. Some poems just happen to me. This was one of them.

Birthday Poem (2025)

Under what conditions
can I be sure
the life I lead is leaving
any legible sort of story

Short of “sorry”
my lips slip into soundlessness

I look back at myself
a year ago
three years ago
seven years ago

A listless room of listeners
waiting
my fingertip indicating
a leaflet I left
lost and found

“I’m sorry…
I can’t make this word out.”

In the month and a half since this poem took shape, I have returned to it often. At first, there was an urgency I felt surrounding the need to remember myself. There was “a listless room of listeners” to answer to. There was also an embarrassment still warm at the inability to translate the “leaflet” my younger self left behind. I don’t mean actual writings. I mean, I felt I needed to answer for the person I used to be, the things I used to believe, used to want, used to say—the discrepancy between who I was and who I am.

In my attempts to, I feel frozen in the main image of the poem. I feel myself standing before a crowd, pointing to a little scrap of paper with messy handwritten notes. I stammer, I squint… but there’s nothing I can offer in explanation. It’s like I am the last speaker of some lost language and historians beg me to translate the scratches on the stone, but all I have is an apology. “I’m sorry… I can’t make this word out.”

Week by week, though, that urgency has slipped away, and the tone of my voice when I read the last lines of “Birthday Poem” has changed. I am prone to deep dives into nostalgia. I think I am looking for glimmers of what’s still true, still good, still worth clinging to. I plunge myself into old journals and photos and voice memos my sister recovered from her college MacBook. I don’t know why I am so attached to this idea that there is an “essential self” I might’ve forgotten to bring along with me into my future. But it’s clearly been on my mind. I wrote it into a song in 2019. It’s never been produced, but I have a scrappy voice memo shelved in my personal Archive of The Self.

I want no excess
I’m keeping only what counts
I’m keeping track of each word that’s
Falling, falling, falling
Out of my mouth

I don’t want to forget it
So easily now…
The memory, the love, the doubt
Falling, I’m falling, I’m falling
For it now

I’m tired of waiting for
A future me
Keep turning corners
Barely recognizing
The parts of me that I should
Never leave

The urgency I felt when “Birthday Poem” was new has been replaced by permission. Permission to look at any “leaflet I left / lost then found” and not ask myself to translate it into something still true, still good, still worthy of clinging to. Some skins should be shed. Instead, I am beginning to ask myself, “What conditions pushed me toward an inauthenticity so overshadowing I can’t find myself in this reflection of me?” I ask, “What did my past self fear?” And most simply, “What did she not know yet?”

The answers to these questions have bridged the distance between present me and past versions of me I didn’t recognize myself in. I want no excess. It’s still true. The mystery of the poem is still unfolding, but I am learning how to keep what counts.

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