For most of my life, I haven’t enjoyed my birthday. Once the shine of new toys and celebrations wore off during my childhood (following yet another ruined birthday party) I was mostly only interested in my birthday as the vehicle my parents used to give their children toys. Most of the time, unless we got a gift of money from a relative (this only applied to cash since all checks were deposited in our college saving account), got a reward for good grade, or saved up our allowances, our parents wouldn’t buy us anything unnecessary. They’d take us to the library or to the video rental store (and eventually the video game rental store) once a week each, but we rarely got anything permanently ours outside of our birthdays, Christmas, and the one souvenir we were allowed during family trips that happened to go somewhere that had a gift shop. Which meant that by the time I was eight or nine, birthdays had become just a means of getting new toys and books that I could keep (being able to keep something as my own was a big deal as a kid with three siblings and a “we will buy ‘big’ things for the family but not a specific child” family rule). They stayed that for a few years and, after the month of August was basically ruined for me by a few years of consecutive traumas during the month, stopped being special. I mean, I was so detached from my birthday that I got through all but the last half hour of my eighteenth birthday before I remembered that it was, in fact, my birthday since I was so busy at college with my new friends and my family wasn’t the sort to reach out via phone calls or texts at the time.

Since then, birthdays have been a mixed bag for me. Sometimes, it was nice to get attention from my friends. Most of the time, it just served to remind me of the people who weren’t paying me any attention, who I no longer would hear from despite my efforts to remain in contact, of the failure of my parents to ever express anything but rote celebration on the day they’d brought me into existence. Years of trying to find ways to celebrate it as an adult and largely failing to ever do anything satisfying because it almost always overlapped with labor day weekend soured me on it further and then my parent’s miserable attempt to cross the boundaries I’d put in place and “solve” my distance from them cemented it as something I would probably never enjoy. Since then, all attempts to celebrate it or even just quietly gather with my friends on the day have failed due to other plans, none of my local friends remembering, and so on. In fact, after how awfully things went in 2023, I gave up altogether and contented myself with an innocuous cookout with friends a few weeks after my 2024 birthday, with no special attachment to my birthday, and the day-of well wishes of the poeple I still spoke to regularly.

This year, though, I wanted to change that. I wanted to do something extra. I resolved to visit my friends, but as the year wound on and the date loomed ever closer, I found myself too depressed and burned out to make plans. Then some things got planned around the weekend, the US government started trying to dismantle society, and I just gave up on it. Until a few weeks prior, when I decided that, since my siblings weren’t available for a digital gathering on my birthday, I’d try to make some kind of plans with my friends, once again without bringing up that it was my birthday. They immediately saw through it, though, which felt nice if a little embarrassing (since I didn’t want them to think that I was trying to hint at something rather than just directly make plans), and when I said all I wanted to do was hang out with friends, they surprised me by offering to come visit. It was a bit of a suprise, since I was also looking at plane tickets to go visit them, and it took me a while to work through my knee-jerk desire to not have them put in any effort on my account, but I did and we made plans.

Which meant that, for the first time in decades, since my eighteenth birthday when I realized it was nearly midnight on my birthday and my parents hadn’t bothered to even send a text message, I didn’t spend a single minute during my actual birthday thinking about who I hadn’t heard from. I received the small handful of distant well-wishes gratefully and enjoyed a truly lovely day with my friends going out to breakfast, enjoying a walk through a botanical garden, and watching a whole bunch of anime afterwards. It was really just such a lovely day, to have my friends-as-family come to visit me simply because I said I wanted to spend time with my friends (despite me meaning it as a “let’s hang out online” kind of thing). It was genuinely nice and it made for the nicest birthday I’ve had in maybe my entire life. Which is a little bit sad, that the bar was so low, but I still appreciate it all the same. I’ve lived with that sadness my entire life, after all, but it’s nice to mix a little joy into it now that I’ve finally, thirty-four years into my life, actually had a birthday I will look back fondly on.