Let me tell you a secret about a rather useless skill I have: I have an incredible memory for people’s birthdays! You tell me the date, and somehow it just sticks to my internal hard drive. This includes people I haven’t seen since middle school. For a while, before Google Calendar or Facebook were a thing, I provided a personalised birthday reminder service to friends who were useless at remembering other friends’ birthdays.
I may have this skill because I like celebrations. I used to be one of those children who loved having a birthday party. My mother was a good host and she was always happy that I wanted to invite lots of friends over.
But, inevitably, at some point during the party, I would be thrown into deep despair by some detail, something so small that’s impossible to remember decades later. I know that one year I became sad because I had an argument with my best friend at the time. Another year, I got upset because a friend did not show up – I simply couldn’t focus on all the others who were there at the party.
I’ve become better at managing expectations, I think, but there’s a characteristic that I maintain from those early days. When an anniversary comes, I get excited, but I also go down a spiral of reminiscence and often self-doubt.
This month, we’re celebrating our first year at The Correspondent. I’m incredibly excited about it all (we even got an audio app for our first birthday!), but I also became paralysed by the amount of things that I was hoping to achieve, and have not been able to do yet.
I had my one-year review with my editor, Rob Wijnberg, and I reflected on some of these i…