Birthdays in the Year of Gratitude

Erica Rhodes
5 min readApr 1, 2021

“The more you praise and celebrate your life, the more there is in life to celebrate.” — Oprah Winfrey

Luca Upper on Unsplash

My Birthday is Monday, and no, I’m not alerting the masses (the 20 people who read my blog) to solicit your Birthday greetings. I tend to dread Birthdays.

Naturally, a Birthday forces you to evaluate where you are in your life, what you’ve accomplished since last year, and a million other little things, which usually send me into the depths of self-pitying despair.

But not this year.

Instead, I’ve made up my mind to celebrate all I’ve overcome this year.

It was a little less than a year ago when I called my sister Hillary at midnight, in a total panic.

“There’s a helicopter circling the building next door, everyone is buying all the toilet paper, and my friend told me to buy a gun or leave. I don’t feel safe here!”

She said I was welcome to visit her and the kids in Tallahassee, Florida, as long as I quarantined for two weeks upon arrival.

She even found me a very cute Airbnb a few miles away.

Days after I arrived, I got very sick and had to quarantine an additional two weeks, so was essentially isolated for a month. But it wasn’t so bad.

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