23 years ago

Welcome once again to the Season of Anniversaries! Twenty-three years ago yesterday, I arrived in New Zealand as a tourist, beginning my current story arc. The recent changes in that story arc are part of the reason I didn’t post about this anniversary yesterday, though there were other reasons. But the fact is, I’m still here, and that’s what matters.

September 12 is the date the marks the start of my not-totally-serious annual series of blog posts about various anniversaries, some of them quite important, that fall between now and January. I wouldn’t want to totally neglect that tradition.

I said last year something that’s always true about these posts:

I’ve said a lot about this date over the years, about the date in 1995, what it meant, why I sort of forgot about it, and how it became important again. Check out previous years’ posts, listed at the bottom of this post, to get more about all that.

Something similar could probably be said of any the annual posts I make, regardless of subject. A particular one may not matter, but collectively they are a story—my story, in whole or in part.

This year there have been complicating factors. I’m still adjusting to the new medication regime the doctors put me on, and that’s left me tired. It’s not as bad as when I was on betablockers—I haven’t had the same issues with memory and focus—but I sometimes completely run out of energy, despite having had a solid night’s sleep. That, and the need to take care of forgotten chores before going to bed, meant I just didn’t have the “oomph” to post last night. Still, my blog, my rules, so I can still mark the occasion the next day.

However, the other reason I didn’t make a point of posting yesterday was because of the same reason I often forgot about this anniversary: September 12 here is September 11 in my native USA, and I saw all sorts of people from all over the ideological map posting about THAT day. It just felt kind of selfish to focus only on my own history—especially because that morning, oblivious to the date, in part because I hadn’t yet checked out Facebook, I shared to my personal page a YouTube video from Vox about bike lanes, of all things. Maybe an important subject, but, regardless, once I went to Facebook, I felt like I’d already intruded on what seemed to be a day of intense reflection for many of my American friends.

Nevertheless, September 12 is an important anniversary for the past 23 years of my life. Last year, I called it “a sort of foundation date”, and it was. And that’s why I remember it each year, even if there are sometimes barriers to doing so.

After all, I’m still here. That’s what matters.

Previous posts about this anniversary (the first three only mention it):

Anniversay Time (2007)
Blogoversary 2 (2008)
Anniversaries Three and Fourteen (2009)
Where it began (2010)
Anniversary of the beginning (2011)
Another anniversary (2012)
18 years ago today (2013)
19 years ago today (2014)
Twenty years ago today (2015)
21 years ago today (2016)
22 years ago today (2017)