#184: The Birthday Badges
Why birthday badges aren’t like other badges
Here are my birthday badges: a collection of pinnable images declaring the amount of years I have existed. They are no longer up to date.
Birthday badges are for children and ‘big birthdays’, for the ages that feel like a milestone. For a child, each birthday, each creeping year, is an achievement. Age three to four to five are huge steps, and birthday badges mark the rapid growth that occurs during these years. For adults, we celebrate 18 and 21, ages that give us new legal rights, and then perhaps each decade. The badges become more spread out as we begin to fear the onset of each year rather than be proud of it.
And age just doesn’t matter in the way it used to. At school, associating with the year above or below seemed unorthodox and either rebellious or a little weird. Once you enter the working world, however, if you refused to become close to people of a different age, you would be a rather lonely and unproductive employee. Declaring that you are 27 rather than 26 really makes very little difference. In fact, you’d be better off with a badge claiming ‘I am in my late twenties’ — a far clearer mark of the general perception of your age.
I tried to uncover the history of birthday badges, but didn’t particularly succeed. Instead, I found this article about the subversive statement of badge-wearing in general. Badges are often used to proudly proclaim something about you — an allegiance to a particular band, a satirical statement about a politician you dislike, or a DIY approach to fashion. Birthday badges, however, seem far from subversive.
A birthday badge is a commercial and popular gift, their designs often a universal sparkle or whatever children’s programme everyone is currently watching. They allot people into specific brackets, not because of any particular personality trait, but simply the neat organisational category of ‘Year of Birth’. Birthday badges seem to sit outside the standard badge tradition.
And yet for some reason, I have kept these objects. This collection of birthday badges feels personal even if generic in design. They are a reminder that yes, once, I was ‘five today’. And though they reveal little about me other than that I have passed through several ages, as I step further and further away from my own childhood, this feels important enough.
