The Shrek Theory

I got my fortune read in Hollywood, Florida, and other birthday musings

Apologies for the lack of a newsletter last Sunday. I went to Florida for five days, which means I was anxiously preparing to go to Florida the five days prior and exhausted from going to Florida for the five days after. I want and try to give Florida a fair shake, as in its defense, it is mostly my emotional context and baggage that I throw onto the state - for the record, Florida has never actively done anything to me (other than the fact it’s always jellyfish season whenever I’m there, no matter the time of year. A lifeguard is always telling me it’s not safe to go in the water, which feels….cosmic.) It’s more so whenever I land in a state where the UV index operates at a forever eight, I get a feeling of uneasiness. Florida, in my opinion, is the epitome of what I like to call a Toon Town. Everything looks like a movie set that could blow over with a sneeze or a slight push from a pinky finger. It exists in a liminal space of very young children and young families or retirees. As I am not within one of those two categories, I feel rudderless there, my only shared quality with these two groups being we both use SPF 75.

Toon Town + the text I get whenever my flight touches down on Floridian tarmac (which could have also been the alternate title for this)

I spent part of the trip in a new Floridian city I had never been to - Hollywood. I stayed with a friend who hails from Hollywood; Hollywood looks like the set of mid90s, that movie about skateboards and depressed middle-schoolers that came out in 2018 that was surprisingly moving and insightful. Hollywood felt ripe for a young, slightly depressed producer to come in and make a documentary. She picked me up and we went to lay on a beach that looked like something out of a Sandals brochure. However, as most things happen in threes, a man yelled at us for being too close to his “space” and to move, the wind started picking up and whipping sand at us, and rain clouds started to move in. (Maybe I take back what I said earlier about Florida never having done anything active to me.) As is the natural course of action when one’s beach day is ruined, she decided to take me to her family’s fortune teller.

It’s unfortunate Florida is so beautiful as it will all be underwater within a decade

Now, was I tempting fate by seeing a fortune teller mere days before my birthday and in the state of Florida? Absolutely. Felt like the perfect way to spend the last days of twenty-eight. We drove to a small yellow apartment complex and made our way over to the fortune teller’s place. She answered the door, a small but powerful eighty-year-old woman with piercing blue eyes (which supports my theory that most people who have a sixth sense have unbelievable blue eyes.) She greeted us with a kiss on each cheek and ushered us into her home, seating us at her table and feeding us sunflower seeds and cookies. It’s probably important to note that she only spoke Farsi and Armenian. There’s something I’ve always found to be deeply peaceful and enjoyable about listening to languages you don’t understand. When I was younger, I always thought about how learning how to read meant you could never go back to not knowing how to read (I know this sounds stupid, but stick with me here.) Every billboard, sign, book, direction, and label would forever be translated, even if you didn’t really care to understand them. In listening to a language I don’t know, I imagine this feeling to be similar to one of posters and billboards were blurry and unknown, and I got to exist without understanding for a little while. Farsi is a beautiful and melodic language to listen to, with seemingly no ending or beginning, just a constant stream of intonations.

The ritual of fortune telling is simple: you are handed a small cup of Turkish coffee, drink it in its entirety, and when finished, flip the coffee cup over onto a saucer. What’s left in the cup forms the basis of your fortune. Yes, I did ask if it could be something other than coffee since I don’t drink it and didn’t want to spike my anxiety amid a session dictating my future. The answer is what I assumed to be an enthusiastic Farsi no.

My fortune and the sunflower seeds

I drank my coffee (which was delicious and involved no anxiety spikes) and waited to see what my cup held. The old woman sat down, put on her reading glasses, and read my cup. I recorded the whole session as my friend was translating Farsi in real time; maybe I’ll add it to a future Substack one day. But the biggest points of note from the reading were that she saw me as a lion, but I continuously make myself small, I don’t trust enough in the people who love and support me to actually love and support me, and everything that is meant to happen will indeed happen, in due time. She also thought I was twenty years old, which, as a recent twenty-nine-year-old, felt great for my ego. It was a beautiful session that gave me comfort and peace. Score one for Florida.

Growing up in the Southwest, I loved that my birthday was in March. It was one of three months of the year with palatable weather, and I’ve always loved the blossoms and growth that springtime brought. As I’ve gotten older (and moved to a city where March is the last hurdle of shitty weather before The Great Thaw begins), I’ve noticed that springtime becomes a right of passage that one must push through to get to their better / hotter / less seasonally depressed and therefore happier self. Everyone tends to focus on springtime as a time of rebirth, of shedding. Rebirths have become synonymous with re-dos - look at the new year and a new year’s resolution. Every year, we’re told we get a chance to wipe the slate clean, and become someone entirely new, unrecognizable, different—better. But we are not told what parts of ourselves we should hold on to. What if some of those old pieces—flawed, awkward, half-formed—aren’t meant to be discarded but rather nurtured? With our re-dos, we are forgoing what has come before, in totality.

Up until this birthday, I’ve mostly thought about getting older as a re-do, not a rebirth. In writing this piece, I spent some time going through past birthday journal entries - usually the only time of year I make an attempt to journal. All of my writings focus on the things I failed at, the things I was embarrassed by, and the things I had to do better the following year. Sure, of course, there was a good dose of gratitude in there as well - I’m not a complete sociopath. But the overall tone of my wishes and manifestations for each new age have been mostly centered around the parts of myself I was hoping to grow out of, not grow into.

Thus, let me introduce you to the Shrek Theory, a perspective I’d like to implement year-round, not just on birthdays or new years or markings of time that “demand” a very specific type of change. We humans are layered, complicated beings, not dissimilar to onions, as was so prophetically pointed out by our dear Shrek. If we all took the time to focus on growth and not erasure, we could utilize and appreciate our layers, stacking new experiences onto old ones rather than throwing out the past like a defective hard drive. And when we grow—when someone harvests, or we harvest ourselves by placing time, love, and energy into our development—we peel those layers back, not to erase them, but to reveal something richer, more tender, more open.

My sprouting onion trying to embody springtime and the Shrek Theory

This year, my birthday fell on a total lunar eclipse - a blood moon. I was alerted multiple times to this by loved ones who thought it was absolutely hilarious (which of course, it is - blood moons tend to bring massive upheaval and discomfort. Some may say I’ve already been living in a blood moon, no?)

Auspicious he says…

It felt like as good a time as any to make this the first year I’m not wishing for things about myself to change or to suddenly acquire a new skill, personality trait, or level of success for the sake of some arbitrary external metric. One night in Florida, at dinner with my mom, she noticed me people-watching (i.e., my main source of joy while in Florida) and told me I was sitting in the catbird seat. It was the first time I heard this idiom; it means a position of advantage or power, alluding to the gray catbird’s habit of perching in a high, exposed position. The catbird doesn’t need to prove its elevation—it simply sits there, watching. Maybe that’s the real birthday lesson, the real Shrek Theory - not to waste energy tearing myself down and rebuilding from scratch, but to recognize the layers I’ve already built. To trust that I am, in fact, already sitting in the catbird seat, whether I acknowledge it or not. Growth isn’t about burning everything down for the sake of reinvention; sometimes, it’s about finally realizing that life is not as linear as it’s believed to be and that you’ve already climbed higher than you thought.

So maybe twenty-nine will be my catbird year, my lion year, the year I stop trying to start over and instead learn to sit with what I’ve built. The year I recognized the view I already have. The year I stop shrinking myself when I was never meant to be small.

And if all else fails, I can always blame Florida.