I've been dreading my birthday

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Hey Spark Family,

My birthday is tomorrow.

I used to love birthdays. Genuinely. The whole thing.

I have dreaded the last few, and this one more than any of them.

Let me say clearly what this is not about. It is not the number. I still feel way younger than I am (count my blessings!), I have so much I’m excited to build and accomplish, and I am so incredibly grateful for my family and who I have become in a way I could not have imagined at twenty-five. The evolution is the best part.

It is the date.

August 14th.

Right at the hinge where summer ends and the boys go back to school.

For most of my life that just meant the end of a season. Backpacks and schedules and the last warm nights.

Then a few years ago it started meaning something else.

The summer before Simon left for college, my birthday stopped being a celebration and became a countdown. A reminder. A representation of something I was dreading.

Every candle felt like it was moving me closer to a goodbye I wanted no part of.

This year it is both of them.

Simon heads back to Michigan. And Miles starts his senior year of high school.

Which means Friday is not just my birthday. It is the opening of the year of “lasts.”

The last first day of school from this house. And once you notice one last, you start seeing all of them.

What I keep doing about it

Looking away.

Not thinking about it. Not counting. Avoiding the pit in my stomach and the weight in my chest. Staying busy enough that it cannot catch me.

If I do not look directly at it, maybe it will hurt less when it comes.

Here is what stopped me: the research says that is exactly backward.

A psychologist named Jaime Kurtz ran a study with college seniors about six weeks from graduation. Students who loved college and felt genuinely torn about leaving. She had half of them sit with graduation as something very close, and half treat it as far away.

The students who sat with the ending being close did more of the things they loved. And they were measurably happier.

Thinking about it ending made them enjoy it more.

That finding has been sitting with me for days.

And there is a reason for it. Laura Carstensen at Stanford has spent decades showing that when we sense our time in something is limited, we do not simply grieve it. We reorganize around it. Attention narrows toward what actually matters. We savor more. We choose the people closest to us.

The ache is not the problem.

The ache is the reorganization.

The part I had not considered

Almost every last in a life passes without anyone noticing.

You do not know the last time you carry your child to bed. You do not know the last time they reach for your hand in a parking lot. It simply happens, and then it never happens again, and you find out years later by accident.

That is the ordinary cruelty of time. The endings are invisible.

I get to know.

I am being handed a year where I can see it coming.

That is brutal. It is also rare.

And here is what I finally noticed about the date itself. My birthday is not the ending.

It is the starting line of the last year.

Tomorrow does not close anything. It opens twelve months I will never get again, and I am walking into them with my eyes wide open.

Where this shows up in leadership

I see the same pattern in leaders constantly, and I have done it myself.

Someone exceptional gives notice, and the leader quietly withdraws for the six weeks that are left. It hurts less that way.

A team hits its last season together before a reorg, and everyone starts talking about the change instead of doing the work.

A leader knows they are moving on in a year, and begins living in the next role instead of this one.

The bracing feels protective. It is not.

Bracing for the ending costs you the time you actually still have. And the time you still have is the only part you can do anything with.

​
🌟 The question I am putting out there

What ending are you bracing for right now?

And what is the bracing costing you today?

Not the loss when it comes. The cost right now, in this week, in the space you are actually in.

I am not going to stop dreading my birthday. That would be a lie, and you deserve better than that from me. (Wait til next year …)

But I have decided the dread is not the enemy. It is the proof.

You only ache like this over things that were extraordinary.

So I am going to let it hurt, and I am going to be completely awake for every ordinary day of this year. The dinners. The drives. The kid appearing in my doorway at eleven at night wanting to talk about nothing.

Those are the lasts that matter. And I am extremely grateful that I know - without a doubt - that I will be loving and living them all.

Grateful,
​Jackie

P.S. If you are in a season of lasts too, with your kids, your team, a chapter that is closing, hit reply and tell me. I read every one. And this year, I think I will need to hear them as much as you might need to send them.

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