According to my mother, I’ve always been someone who cries on birthdays. When I was little, I used to cry on everyone else’s birthday—especially my siblings’—but for the past couple years, I’ve been crying on my own.
Every time my birthday comes around, I set myself up for disappointment, and usually, it comes. I don’t know if it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, or if all of the issues I have year round feel so much worse on a day when I’m meant to feel happy and loved.
I’ve never been someone who consistently had a lot of friends, and I’ve definitely never been someone who consistently had big birthday parties, but I think everything about my birthday really started to go downhill when I turned 12. At the time, I had two really close friends, and maybe three or four other girls that I was close with. I was so excited to actually have a bigger birthday party, something that I hadn’t had in a couple years, and I spent hours deciding what I wanted to do—have a spa day, and have my godmother (who went to cosmetology school) do our makeup, basically the coolest thing I could think of as an almost 12-year-old—and making invitations by hand for all of my friends.
None of them could come.
I was crushed, and I remember feeling like it didn’t even seem like it mattered to them. Probably me-of-now projecting my feelings onto me-of-then, but still. After that year, I mostly gave up on celebrating my birthday with anybody other than my family. I think there was maybe a year or two between middle school and freshman year of high school where I had one or two friends over to watch a movie, or something like that, but mostly I didn’t do anything at all.
Somewhere along the way, I started expecting, and dreading, the disappointment that was inevitably going to come when January 22nd rolled around.
In high school, it was worse. I started struggling to connect with people, especially my friends, more than ever, and that made my issues around my birthday a whole lot bigger. Most of my friends didn’t seem to know, or care, that it was my birthday—the few that did absolutely made my day—and I didn’t even bother to ask if anyone wanted to do anything with me. For a big chunk of my sophomore year of high school I felt like I was completely fading into the background, completely losing touch with my friends, and my birthday certainly didn’t help. Neither did the fact that school closed in March of that year, and I didn’t go back in person until my senior year. I didn’t have anything close to a sweet 16.
My 17th birthday wasn’t great either, but my 18th was by far the worst. Not only did I do absolutely nothing with my friends—I don’t think more than 2 or 3 even messaged me a quick happy birthday—I had an entire crisis. My 18th birthday was officially the end of my childhood; my last chance to have anything resembling the birthdays I saw in all the movies and tv shows I watched growing up, the last birthday I would get to spend at home—with my family, especially my mom, who were always the best part of my birthday—for at least a couple years. All of the things that I had wanted to do as a teenager, all my hopes and dreams for close friendships and parties and effortless hangouts, went up in smoke. And believe me, I cried about it. A lot. Mostly in the shower, or anywhere else I didn’t think anyone would see me.
This year, thankfully, was measurably better. I’m officially a college freshman, and since coming to Pitt, I’ve made closer friends than I’ve had in a very long time, if not ever before. In the days leading up to my birthday, I still couldn’t help but prepare for the crushing disappointment that at that point seemed inevitable, expecting none of my friends to know or care about it at all (irrational, I know, but I can’t help it). My family came to visit me on the day of my birthday, and I got to not only see them and take them to my favorite part of Pittsburgh I’ve had the chance to visit—the Strip District. After we went out to get hotpot, one of my favorite birthday meals, and on top of that, I also got to do something with my friends for the first time in years. My mom brought the birthday cake she made for me, and we ate it at one of the tables in the WPU with my two closest friends. It was such a small moment, 20-30 minutes max, but it was huge for me. I had worked up the nerve to ask some of my friends if they wanted to do something for my birthday, and hadn’t gotten a huge disappointment in response. Maybe next year, I’ll even ask all of my friends if they actually want to go and do something with me, instead of being too afraid to ask, like I was this year.
In all honesty, I’m writing this because I know I’m not the only person to feel something like this, and I want anybody who’s reading it to know they’re not either. For a long time, I felt like there must be something wrong with me, not just because I wasn’t happy on my own birthday, but because I struggled so much with the whole friendship aspect of it. It really wasn’t until I downloaded TikTok (I know) that I saw other people who felt the same as me, or at least similarly. Birthdays can be scary, and they can be hard—especially when we’ve been taught our whole lives that getting older is something to fear—but they can also get better. I hope my birthday keeps getting easier for me, stops being something that I dread so much, and I hope yours gets better for you. If it doesn’t, it’s just one day; you have the entire rest of the year to celebrate yourself. If you need to take your birthday to just feel what you feel, even if everything you feel is negative, do it. And, if worst comes to worst, take a page out of icaruspendragon’s book and just pick a new one. You deserve it.
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