I hate my birthday

Absolutely loathe it. And in an hour and a half, I will be turning 27.

Technically I won’t be turning 27 until roughly 8pm on Monday, the 23rd of April, and it won’t be a proper birthday until it snows somewhere on the Front Range, according to my mother who had to ask how old I was turning. I can’t decide how I feel about the fact my mother can’t remember how old her first child is. Part of me is offended because I feel like your first child ought be something of an occasion worth tracking, and it is a continual fight in my relationship with my mother to remind her I am no longer 6 or 16 years old and am, in fact, an adult. But on the other hand, I am a certain demarcation line in my mother’s life, the line between “Young Lady Who Wore Suits and Made Things Happen” and “Under-Prepared but Nevertheless Determined Woman Who Made Sure She Raised a Human Who Is Loved At Great Personal Cost.” I could see how something so small and silly as linear time would be an insufficient measure of such an intense change for her. In that regard, it’s a little miraculous she occasionally acknowledges I’ve aged at all.

That’s not why I hate my birthday — I mean, Mom never forgets it. Even on her second course of antibiotics for a nasty infection this year she still made us reservations, and she always wrangles everyone to the same table no matter what else is going on. No, Mom is probably the only reason I don’t petition the Pope to wipe the 23rd of April off the Gregorian calendar and declare it a false day we’ve just collectively hallucinated thanks to the devil or fluoride in the water.

I mean, if there was no April 23rd, I wouldn’t have to watch the slow march of time tick past me with so very little to show. I could be perpetually ageless, flowing and floating through on my own schedule, not annually checking myself against the size charts of the other kids my age, wondering when I’ll grow enough to reach the monkey bars or be in a healthy romantic relationship or own a yacht or be an Instagram influencer. My Saturn Return wouldn’t be a ticking bomb sitting in my lap as I wait for the universe to decide to quietly implode on me some time in the next three years. All of the “when I was your age” comments, well meant though they might be, would simply roll off me because I am no age you ever could have been. If there was no birthdays, I would be free from the societal bullshit that expects me to act a certain way based on the number of days I’ve survived.

But even that I can deal with. I’m afraid I’ve buried the lede here, semi hoping you wouldn’t make it this far into my list of complaints. No, I hate my birthday because it is an annual reminder of the time I was so depressed I almost killed myself.

Eight years on, that sentence is incredibly difficult to write.

And this is also where I get stuck, and why every year on Facebook I wish myself a happy anniversary rather than a happy birthday, and let people speculate to themselves what I’m celebrating. To explain the whys and the hows of how I found myself researching painless ways to end my life a few scant weeks before my 19th birthday is somehow achingly insufficient an explanation. To attempt to describe the intense psychological and spiritual pain I found myself in is to reopen a wound I’m not ready to look at. And to even tell this to people is to expose myself to the potential for the same sort of reactions I got when I was 19 and was “caught” by someone recognizing my handwriting on a PostSecret and had to deal with clumsy RAs and forced therapy and my mother’s fear being met the only way she knew how — a combination of yelling about how dare I threaten her baby so, and to provide overbearing but not all that helpful solutions. It’s to start crying again when I hear the voice of my then-boyfriend whisper pleadingly on the phone, “Please don’t leave me.”

It’s a dark mark in my history, a place I don’t like being. And if I was doing this “right”, this is the part where I’d tell you I’m so glad I didn’t end my march through time in a dorm room bathroom at 18. I’d describe the beautiful sunlit apartment I share with a good friend and her lovely dog, I’d tell you about the job I work that exposes me to so many great people I never would have known. I’d tell you about how I rang in my 27th with not one but three really fantastic birthday meals with people who are so achingly lovable, so humanly perfect that their friendship puts light in my life in ways I don’t know that I could ever describe it to them. And all those things are true — home, job, relationships — but I still find myself trying to keep my head down around my birthday, white knuckling through the month of April, sending psychic “it’ll get better”s and “I’m here, I love you”s to my 18 year old self drowning in a dark place 8 years ago. It’s like driving past that part of the highway where you got sideswiped and went spinning into the barrier, and you don’t know how you survived, and even though you’re fine now, you still go a little slower, pay a little more attention, grip the wheel a little harder as you pass and watch it recede in your rear view mirror.

All this to say — I’m here, I made it. To other survivors of your own dark places, I want to validate that anniversaries are fucking difficult, and it’s okay if you don’t want to mark them in ways other people understand. To the friends who celebrated my birthday with me in the quiet ways I wanted, to my family who loves me the best ways they are capable of and always try to be better because they love me so fiercely, to the loved ones who fit in both these categories, I want you to take a deep breath and remember that who I am now is a result of the dark place I survived, and it doesn’t diminish how much we love each other, how grateful I am for you now, how loudly I laugh and how brightly I smile just because you’re near. To those who have never been through something like this, who’s natural instinct is to recoil because you don’t know how to and frankly don’t want to empathize with me, I want you to sit in that discomfort so that if you run into another survivor or someone going through their own hell, you know a little better how to make space for their pain. To myself —

I love you. I’m glad you’re here.