In case you haven’t heard, every year on my birthday, I do something I’ve never done before.
I know we’re talking about this in July (instead of June) because we’ve been busy talking about kidneys, Hillary Clinton, and mud runs – oh my!
For the record, my birthday is indeed in June. It’s June 25th – halfway between Christmas and Christmas (and the anniversary of Michael Jackson’s death).
I started this whole doing something I’ve never done before in 2010. Coincidentally, that was 1 year following Michael Jackson’s death.
In case you’re not an avid blog reader of mine, I love and adore Michael Jackson. He was the reason I was inspired to get into the entertainment industry. I was inspired by him to try to be a better person and do the charity work I do (though admittedly some of that is also Cory Booker and my dad and other good influences).
But Michael Jackson was a humongous part of my life (even though I never met him), and it was pretty devastating when he died… in fact, I always (half-jokingly) say my heart literally broke when he died, because that was around the time I found out about my heart issues.
In 2010, I put on a public workshop of a musical I’d written. I’d never performed a full musical I’d written for a public audience before. So, that was something new.
There wasn’t some master plan to start this “new thing every year.” It just sort of happened that between my job starting with America’s Got Talent and wrapping things up on the east coast – leaving school and my apartment and all that jazz – my birthday ended up being the weekend I could make it work. So, that’s what I did.
It was nice to ring in my birthday with a project. Quite honestly, while in the car running last-minute errands before the show, I cried a little as I listened to the station playing all Michael Jackson all day, honoring his life on this anniversary of his death.
Even before Michael Jackson died, my birthday has not always been the best day. It seems like things always go wrong – someone breaks into my apartment and I get robbed, or other smaller things get wonky. It’s just never seemed to be an awesome day.
And especially now that my role model died on my birthday, I could tell on that first anniversary that it would be an extremely sad day. And I wouldn’t necessarily want to get up and do anything. So, instead of wasting the day wallowing, thinking about how rough June 25ths seem to be – it’s better to grab the day and really do something with it.
It’s also a bit of tempting fate – like, “what’s up? You usually make this day pretty crummy. I’m gonna go on a police ride a long [or whatever]. What do you have to say about that?”
Someday when I then die on my birthday, feel free to talk about how foolish I was.
So, in 2010, after inadvertently starting this tradition, I thought it’d be a nice one to continue.
Tomorrow, we’ll talk about what I did this year.