A birthday surprise

***Warning***

Ranty emo-fest alert. If you are not in the mood for that, skip to the Determined Cat picture. That's where the good stuff starts.

I hate birthdays.

Or rather, I hate my birthday. At least I used to, until this year.

My birthday falls in the middle of the Summer. 
This normally meant that:

1. I was never able to just bring a cake to school.
2. Everyone always forgot about my birthday, because everyone was on holiday on that day.
3. Everyone, that is, except me.

My parents being artists, usually they worked more during the school holidays than during the school year. Yep, that means during my birthday too.
Also, in Sicily it is stupidly hot in August, so someone invented the rule that I couldn't have a birthday cake, because it was too hot to eat it.

Revenant...

'ello everyone!

I have been away (both physically and metaphorically) for a long time.

My last post and subsequent absence made me realise how many more people than I thought are actually reading this little blog.

In the past few weeks since I've been back to the UK and started to do Buddhist activities again, I have had a lot of people expressing concern about my happiness after having read that post. Some people wondered if I had stopped practising, some others thought I had abandoned the blog.

I came back to the blog today and found THREE beautiful comments awaiting my approval.

I feel loved.

I don't want to discuss what happened to me (I will refer to it from now on as That Thing That Happened, or TTTH), people close to me know it well enough and I don't want to dwell on it. Things that happen to us, I believe, are not important in themselves, but only for the relevance and connection they have to our own lives. In other words, it's not what happens that we have to analyse, it's our reaction to it.