When ‘Happy Birthdays’ are more than just ‘Happy’!

Our birthday is not far away and it raises a lot of mixed feelings for us. There is the excitement of celebrations, surprises and seeing friends. But there is so much more to our Birthday than this.

There is the resentment of celebrating a day that many of us wished had never happened. Alongside this there is acknowledgment and perhaps a little pride that we have survived another year.

There is the utter discombobulation for younger parts that the body they inhabit will in fact be 37(!), a number so strange and abstract when really you are 9 or 11 or 15….

There is the wanted, unwanted contact from family who want to pretend everything is normal. Wanted because we would love everything to be normal too and just play some version of imperfectly happy families. Unwanted because it only goes to highlight how little our family ‘gets’ and how far away we are from any semblance of a healthy relationship with any of them, not to mention how triggering having contact from them is.

Lastly there is the need to manage the attention that a birthday brings. Something that many of us find excruciating. When it is our birthday we feel a greater sense of being watched and on display than usual. Every movement we make feels somehow amplified and impossibly, shamefully, embarrassing. Many parts try and get through the day and those around it without mentioning it’s our birthday, without anyone remembering, so that the eyes stay off us and so that we can prove to ourselves that we are nothing, that we are not worth remembering or celebrating.

These tactics have become less effective as the years have gone on. Since we’ve left school and home, as who we really are has been allowed to emerge and we’ve made friends and connections who insist that they like this person ‘Liv’, it has become harder to hide the birthday away. This is a positive challenge to us and our thinking.

We don’t think it will ever stop being complicated, but, perhaps as time goes on we will all start to want to celebrate this ‘Liv’ person each year as much as others do.