I used to hate my birthday with all my heart. Even as a kid, I dragged my feet when my mother wanted to have a birthday party for me. In part, it was because I didn’t have any friends and felt as if the girls I asked only came on sufferance. Was that true? Probably not. They were really nice girls–it really was just my own insecurity speaking.
I remember my tenth or eleventh birthday, sitting in the dining room, miserable, as they sang happy birthday to me. The candles on the princess cake were lit, and all I could think about was how gross and fat I was, and how they must have hated being there. I was a hot mess as a kid. All I really wanted was to be left alone, but that was not acceptable. My mom was firmly convinced that she had to give my brother and me a normal American childhood (for which I do not blame her. It was really pushed on immigrants at the time), which included having a princess cake at your eleventh birthday party, damn it!
By the time I hit college, I hated my birthday. Not only because I did not want the attention, but because I started thinking of it as a mark of another wasted year on this earth. I didn’t feel like I deserved to be alive, and my birthday reminded me that I was digging myself deeper into a negative balance. It’s not logical, but mental illness rarely is.
When I first joined Facebook, you HAD to put your birthday in your profile, which you could not make private. So, I did what anybody who hated their birthday would do–lied about my birthday in my Facebook profile. I made it a random day in January and was always surprised when I got a flood of happy birthdays on that day in January on my FB wall.
Then, FB finally came to its goddamn senses and allowed me to make my birthday private. Once I could do that, I didn’t have to deal with my birthday on FB again. Yay!
Why did I hate my birthday? Because. What? That isn’t a good enough explanation? Ok. Let’s do this then.
*Deep breath*
I’ve been told since I was a young girl, explicitly and tacitly, that my worth was in how much I could support other people, namely my parents. I wasn’t enough in and of myself, oh, no. I was only worthwhile through giving of myself emotionally.
More to the point, I got it in my head that I was toxic. Not because of anything specifically, but just me in general. I felt like I had to continuously earn my ‘right’ to live. I lost ground every day because the way it was set up (in my head), there was no way I could get back to neutral, let alone be in the positive numbers.
This all seems so bizarre to me now, but I’ll get to that in a minute.
During those years, I hated my birthday so much. I was miserable when anyone mentioned it, and I tried to deflect whenever it came up. Without fail, my parents would bring it up in the context of what had I done for it and then got upset when I said nothing. That didn’t help, by the way. Their fuss over it, I mean. My mom cried one year when I said my birthday meant nothing to me because it was one of the biggest days of her life (so she says).
Every birthday was heightened because of the extreme feelings on both sides. Now, I look back and shake my head, but at the time, it made me feel worse every time they made a big deal about my birthday. To be clear, it was whatever that they were so pro-my birthday. I didn’t like it, but I wasn’t upset about it, either. Not really. It was when they got upset about me not caring enough that bothered the hell out of me.
It showed, however, their narcissism in all its glory. Their feelings about my fucking birthday was more important than my own. It’s the same with my recent medical trauma. The second day I was home, my father and I had an argument because he would not shut the fuck up about me living with someone. When I said that I didn’t want to do that (at, admittedly, increasing volumes), he literally said to me that I didn’t understand how hard it (my medical trauma) had been for him and my mother.
I said to him in astonishment (and, yes, anger) that I knew how hard it was because I had been there (with the unspoken assertion that it fucking happened to me, not them), and he quickly brushed it aside. Yes, I was the one who literally died twice and was in a coma for a week, but, he was the one who suffered. I’m not saying it wasn’t hard on him, but come the fuck on. I was the one who experienced it! I liked to joke that it wasn’t hard on me because I was unconscious the whole time, but it was a joke.
No matter what happens, my parents have a way of centering it around them. With my birthday, it just made a hard day harder, and it would make me depressed for days afterwards.
At some point, roughly four years ago,
I began to care less and less about hating my birthday (along with other holidays). I didn’t like it, mind, but I didn’t go into such a deep funk about it, either. I became neutral about it, just letting it happen without comment. At least, I would have if my parents still didn’t insist on making a big deal about it.
I tried to let it not get to me and in the pandemic years, I actually got a little cake to celebrate my birthday. Or brownie. Something like that (GF/DF. By the way, I was just raving about how good GF/DF foodstuff is this day in comparison to 25 years ago–to Ian, of course. They have made leaps and bounds in this area, for which I am profoundly grateful. KIND ice cream bars are fucking incredible. ‘Nuff said.)
So, yeah, in the last few years, I’ve been at least neutral about my birthday, if not positive. I no longer cringed about it–oh, yes. One thing I forgot to mentioned. I used to tell people when my birthday was because I hated it so much. I lied about it online for any website that required it (which, honestly, I don’t feel bad about), and I made a big deal whenever it got brought up.
That changed as well in the last few years. I didn’t go around announcing my birthday, but I didn’t try to hide it, either. I was matter-of-fact about it if anyone else brought it up. I was fine with being neutral about my birthday as it was a big step up from hating it.
Then, this birthday came around–or is close to coming around–and everything has changed. Why? Because I was not supposed to make it to this birthday. I died twice in September with a prognosis so dim, my brother started thinking about planning my funeral. My fiftieth birthday should have been my last, but it wasn’t.
I have called these my bonus days, and now we’re up to my first bonus birthday. I will enjoy it with all my might.