Today is my birthday.

I'm not going to tell you how old I am — that's my business — but I will tell you that this one feels different from most. Maybe it's the time of year. Maybe it's where I am in life. Maybe it's just that the older I get, the more I understand what it actually means to still be here, doing this, on a day like today.

Deanna's birthday is coming up later this month too. October is a big month in our house.

I used to have a complicated relationship with birthdays. For a long time after my disability became a central part of my life, birthdays felt less like celebrations and more like checkpoints — moments where I'd measure the distance between who I used to be and who I was now. That's a rough way to spend a day that's supposed to be about cake.

It took me a while to get to a different place with it. Here's where I landed.

Birthdays Used to Be About the Future

Before disability was part of my story, birthdays were mostly forward-looking. Another year older meant another year closer to something — a goal, a milestone, a version of life I was building toward. The birthday was almost incidental. It was a marker on a timeline that was mostly about what came next.

Disability has a way of disrupting that relationship with the future. When your body is unpredictable, when plans fall apart because of a flare or a bad week or a medication change, the future starts to feel less like a destination and more like a question mark. You can't always count on "next year" looking the way you imagined.

That sounds bleak. It isn't, actually. Or at least it doesn't have to be.

What Shifts When the Future Gets Uncertain

When I stopped being able to take the future for granted, something unexpected happened: the present got louder.

I started noticing things I'd been moving too fast to see. The way a good morning feels when you've had enough bad ones to know the difference. The specific quality of a day when the pain is manageable and the energy is there and you can just... do things. The value of a conversation that goes somewhere real.

Birthdays became less about the year ahead and more about the year behind. What happened? What did I learn? Who showed up? What did I manage to build or say or feel, even on the hard days?

That's a better question than "what am I going to accomplish next year?" At least for me.

The Disability Tax on Celebrations

I want to be honest about something, because this is that kind of site: celebrating with a disability has a cost that most people don't see.

There's the planning — making sure wherever we go is accessible, that I won't be exhausted before the main event, that there's a way out if I need one. There's the energy math — knowing that a big day usually means a recovery day after, and building that into the calendar. There's the emotional weight of wanting to be fully present for something that matters and not always being able to guarantee that your body will cooperate.

None of that means I don't celebrate. I do. But I've learned to celebrate differently — in ways that fit my actual life rather than some idea of what a birthday is supposed to look like.

Sometimes that means a quiet dinner instead of a party. Sometimes it means celebrating over a few days instead of trying to pack everything into one. Sometimes it means letting people come to me instead of the other way around. The form has changed. The meaning hasn't.

What I'm Actually Grateful For

On a birthday, you're supposed to reflect. So here's my honest reflection.

I'm grateful for Deanna. Building this site together, building a life together — she's the person who makes the hard days survivable and the good days worth celebrating. Her birthday later this month is going to be a big deal in this house, and it should be.

I'm grateful for this community. When we started Don't-Dis-Abilities, I wasn't sure who would show up. The answer has been: people who get it. People who are living the same complicated, real, sometimes brutal, often beautiful life that disability asks of you. That means everything.

I'm grateful for the year. Not because it was easy — it wasn't, not all of it — but because I was in it. Present for it. That's not nothing. That's actually quite a lot.

A Note to Anyone Who Finds Birthdays Hard

If you're reading this and birthdays are complicated for you — because of grief, because of what disability has taken, because the gap between the life you have and the life you imagined feels especially visible on days like this — I see you.

You don't have to perform joy you don't feel. You don't have to be grateful on command. You're allowed to feel whatever you actually feel on your birthday, including the hard stuff.

And if you can find one thing — one small, real thing — that makes today worth marking, that's enough. That's more than enough.

For me, today, it's this: I'm here. Deanna's here. You're here, reading this. That's a birthday worth having.

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More from the Don't-Dis-Abilities community:

• Celebrating with a Disability: Birthdays and Big Moments
• Disability Identity and Pride: Owning Who You Are
• Living Fully: How I Stopped Apologizing for My Disability