I’m turning 38 today, and I’m officially fresh out of patience for nonsense and performative pleasantries. The training wheels are off, my gloves are gone, and so is the leash I once wore to make other people comfortable. If you’ve read my work before, you already know I don’t suffer fools. As a Phoenix, I incinerate them. But until now, I’ve been polite about it.

Not anymore. I’m lighting the candles on my dairy-free birthday cake with a flamethrower, garnished with cane-sugar frosted phoenix feathers, and a few barbed roses for flair.

After much recalibration, some recent soul-wrenching losses, and the kind of betrayal you only read about in Greek tragedies, I’ve decided Life and Times is staying alive. I considered ditching my essay writing altogether, but as I’ve decided to start rage journaling, I have the raw material to keep it going. So, my website content will start evolving and mutating into new directions even I can’t predict.

The filter’s off. I’m curating my rage and weaponizing my sarcasm. I’ve always been a smartass in real life, but I’ve kept it on a leash in my essays, because I’ve been told my blatant sarcasm makes me sound unhinged. My lovelies, if I were actually unhinged, I wouldn’t be out here constructing two separate coherent essay series, along with writing one novella right after the other, while processing all my long-term relationships that imploded in a dumpster fire of dead names and bigoted obscenities.

Yes, you can justify anything with logic. Frankly, that’s at the beating heart of Chronicles of Absurdia. It’s now hosted by the gloriously overeducated and wildly sassy narration of Persephone “Percy” Belle, my Gen Z philosophical alter ego who holds a metaphorical scalpel in one hand and a degree in Comparative Philosophy in the other. As for me, my personal throughline has become just this: everything is absurd, and no one is coming to fix it. All you can do is choose how to live, how to act, who to love, and where to give a damn.

But the whole secret is, my lovelies, give a damn strategically. Give a damn about the people who give something back, who fill your cup, who show up when it matters, and who don’t flinch when you’re messy, furious, weird, or wild. (I’m usually some combination of all four, of course.) The rest of them, keep at arm’s length or across the street. Better yet, the worst of them keep buried somewhere in the past with a little gravestone that says, “Here lies a lesson learned the hard way.”

Here’s the one weird truth I’m building this next era on: if it doesn’t nourish you, it has no business staying in your forest. So, I’m burning down the overgrowth. Every decayed memory, every rotted relationship, every crumbling structure I once thought I needed — I’m lighting it all up in this birthday bonfire. The ash will feed new roots. For that, the seedlings will be stronger. Then the forest I grow next won’t be shaped by what I lost, but by what I choose to protect.

Happy 38th trip around Sol to me. If you don’t mind, bring marshmallows to the bonfire. I could use the sugar rush.

~ Amelia Desertsong