🎂 Today is my 36th birthday and my wish for the coming year is to be more like this younger version of myself. I want to care less about how I look and present to others. I want to be uninhibited and unapologetically weird. This kid confidently cut his own bangs with craft scissors and decorated his face with cheese puffs. He wore spandex, danced in public, sang at the top of his lungs and wasn’t fixated on how others perceived him. He actually liked having his picture taken, which is something that is now extraordinarily uncomfortable for me. I’ve spent so much of my life trying to become a different person and dreaming of a fully-realized version of myself. Feeling a profound sense of pressure to find the “real” me and hoping to be liked for it. But the older I get the more I am aware of the fact that I have always been who I truly am and that my personal journey is about coming back to the boy I was before the world got to me. I was deserving of great things when this photo was taken and I still am today. Happy Birthday to me 💜