Another year, another birthday

How many birthdays will come with you secretly saying to yourself that I am not happy with the life that I have.

Each year counting the countless ways you have toiled and tried to make it better but all you have is failure and sacrifices and plans being jeopardized by those you care about most. Some days you smile anyway because  now smiling is a choice and happiness is an attitude and no longer a state of being or a condition set from satisfaction. You realize that satisfaction maybe is your choice but we don't all get what we choose. And all that stuff about happiness being a displacement, a result of the pursuit of God  or something else... You're starting to believe that now. Because every once in a birthday you look back and think the year wasn't so bad, or it could've been worse. That on the moments when you threw caution to the wind and said to yourself what the heck, whatever happens will happen and I'll survive it or die and either way that's fine, those are the days you started loving, pain and all. And in embracing pain and change and turmoil and loss, there was nothing left but joy to feel after everything that was meant to kill you didn't. Because you got broken over and over and over and over again so many times you no longer keep count because now it's become an expectation. You got betrayed and you're fully experienced with loss. You lost your mind even, a couple of times. Went looking for yourself just so you could grasp reality again when even that proved to be fickle. You remained. You stayed. The you that you're not even sure of anymore whether it's pieces of a soul or a broken heart or a mesh of ideologies or dreams or just a lie.  Its the you that is your flesh that survived it all. Perhaps to be reprogrammed again. Perhaps. Perhaps not. However you were there and you remembered just as you realized that you were all you needed in the world.