Kimberly Hirsh logo Kimberly Hirsh

Birthday selfie from yesterday in my South Square Mall - oops I meant Starcourt Mall - hat.

A white woman and a white child smile. They both have dark hair. The woman wears a black baseball cap with a pink brim and a logo with a bull jumping through a pink letter D, on the foreground of a turquoise star.

Finished reading: Carrie by Stephen King 📚

I don’t recall the last time I read a book inside of 24 hours.

Me: I don’t know what to do! Should I spend the next 45 minutes reading CARRIE or playing METROID?
W: I like the 80s, too.

Posted on my birthday in 2018:

Yesterday I found out that my thyroid is out of whack again. I’m trying to remember everything I learned before, not just about how to heal, but also how to cope.

plus ça change…

It's my birthday! Here's who I want to be and how we should celebrate.

I’m 41 today and it’s a big deal because every day that I live is a day I chose to be in the world and a whole year of sticking around is huge.

40 has been by turns amazing and rough. But mostly I’ve loved how it feels like the perfect age to really go all in on unapologetically being myself and to completely bail on caring about any superficial opinion anyone has of me. It’s also a great age to realize mostly people aren’t silently criticizing me, because they’re too focused on themselves to pay attention to me.

Who I wanted to be at 40 is also who I want to be at 41. I’m doing a good job on all of those. 41 will be a year of maintaining that and having new adventures.

If you want to be part of the virtual celebration of Kimbertide, I offered some good suggestions in 2020 and 2021. I’ll probably do some of those.

Thanks for hanging out with me on the Internet this year, y’all. You bring a lot of love and connection into my life.

🔖📝 Read On Writing with Chronic Migraines (Catapult) by Yuvi Zalkow.

I really appreciate Zalkow’s metaphors for pain and tiered system for deciding what work to do. This may inspire me to create my own spreadsheet of task levels.