Today is my birthday,

which also used to be known as Score Keeping Day.  I would spend hours wondering who would remember it was my birthday. Which family members, sponsees, or friends would forget? Who would just text instead of calling? Who forgot mine even though I remembered theirs? Let’s be honest, every day was Score Keeping Day, my birthday only made it more apparent.

Their score would be generated using some self-centered calculus; divided by if this was a one-time thing or a chronic infraction, multiplied by how close I thought they were to me, raised to the power of how low my self-esteem was at the time.   

Somewhere in my subconscious these scorecards were being written out and cataloged for future use.  Maybe those offenders would get a passive-aggressive remark or a cold shoulder, a few would get the double-barrel force of my hurt feelings.  Some innocent bystanders might even get my spilled-over anger, the result of suppressing it for too long. 

How much of my life had been spent keeping score and meting out punishment?  Countless hours wasted and for what?  To placate the adolescent pouting, stomping their feet around in my head?  To make myself supposedly feel better for the "harm" caused me?  But I wasn’t feeling any better. Was this behavior really serving any purpose other than to make me feel superior, to prop up this fragile ego filled with low self-worth? 

I’m not sure when, but at some point, it dawned on me.  Maybe it was the birthday dinner that too few friends showed up for.  Maybe it was when one of them told me about their real troubles that caused them to forget my birthday. Maybe it was when I learned that if I was truly honest the root cause of these feelings had nothing to do with other people.  Maybe it was when I accepted there were people in my life who were just not capable of being the type of person who would remember my birthday, along with many other unenforceable rules I had conjured up. 

I started to soften up. Acceptance, tolerance, perspective, humility, and unconditional love; these were the tools that would allow me to win this game. Not with some new set of rules, some new scorecard, but by throwing out the rules altogether. All these years later Joshua still had the answer, "The only winning move is not to play." 

Next time I wanted to celebrate my birthday with friends I took a different approach. Instead of waiting around for one of them to ask me out to dinner, I invited them out instead.  These were the guys I loved and wanted to spend time with, and I treated them - a reversal from those old ways.  This is what my birthday was meant to be all along, a celebration of who I had become through the love and support of others.   

This was not me needing my ego-tank to be filled, I was the only one who could top that tank off.  I discovered that the fear of scarcity had left me. I was no longer afraid of giving unconditionally, and the more I gave away the more I filled back up. I had been transformed from a black hole sucking in all the energy from those around me to a bottomless well of love.  As long I take care of myself I can keep dropping that bucket down again and again, I'll never run dry.  This was the "spiritual calculous" that Bill Wilson wrote about in his Emotional Sobriety letter.  The result is a freedom and connection to others that I never knew was possible, and I could finally send the Scorekeeper off to retirement.