I had grown so accustomed to hating my birthday that wanting a birthday cake seemed like a shameful desire.
Even though I had come to terms with wanting more than a makeshift, air-dry clay volcano for my birthday, admitting it felt wrong. I had grown so accustomed to hating my birthday that wanting a birthday cake seemed like a shameful desire. Since I had never felt compelled to enjoy my birthday, I hadn’t ever thought of why I would be ashamed to. After a quick analysis, however, it became clear to me that I was not alone in my hatred for birthdays. This intense disdain for birthday celebrations was shared and reinforced by the people around me: it was a bandwagon of birthday shame.
It became a threat to make a big deal about someone's birthday.
As my friends and I neared double digits, the birthday celebrations shrank in number before ceasing altogether. From the moment the last birthday party I attended ended, none of my friends have expressed genuine joy for their birthday. For years now, every time one of us has had a birthday, we’ve insisted heavily on not making it a big deal⎯usually forcing each other into a birthday dinner where the birthday person ends up making the guests choose where we eat. It became a threat to make a big deal about someone’s birthday. It was then that I realized it wasn’t just me who hated my birthday; we all hated our birthdays.
The hive mind that was my friend group, and for the most part, our generation as a whole, had decided that birthdays were not to be celebrated but rather condemned as an evil personification of aging. What originally began as an investigation aimed at finding the least offensive way to admit to my friends that I wanted a birthday cake became a mission to understand why we all felt this negatively about our birthdays---and to find out if we all harbored the secret desire to break this cycle.
I nonchalantly integrated the birthday question into conversations with my friends, asking how they felt about their birthday and if they had ever felt any differently about it. The results were as I expected: all my friends have some inexplicable gripe with their birthday. I received a myriad of generic complaints as applicable in describing birthdays as they would be in describing a piece of clothing they didn’t want to buy, such as: “Well, I don’t know; I just don’t like it.” “It just draws too much attention.” “It makes me feel older.”
Most of them developed their birthday resentment as they grew up, like I did. Now, they subscribe to the idea that turning twenty is essentially ancient—and that asking for acknowledgment on your birthday is the loudest cry for attention one could make. In one conversation with a friend, I asked if she knew anyone our age who genuinely enjoys their birthday, to which she responded, “Yeah, but she’s kind of a narcissist, so it checks out.”
Our generation has perpetuated self-awareness to such a degree that we have come to regard existing for another year as more of an inconvenience to others than an occasion for celebration.
Our generation has perpetuated self-awareness to such a degree that we have come to regard existing for another year as more of an inconvenience to others than an occasion for celebration. To me, birthdays are a microcosm of the greater sense of self we have all lost. Our tendency to think the worst of ourselves has taken root in every facet of our lives, as seen in Spotify daily mixes titled “sad 2000s nostalgia-core afternoon” and a rise in the fan bases for Me Before You-esque movies. It’s evident that we have glorified sadness, fear-mongered aging, and normalized thinking of the space we occupy as an inconvenience. I feel that we all harbor a desire to have our birthdays truly be about us, but the social attitudes of our generation have led many to jump on the birthday-hating bandwagon, transforming the tradition into a type of guilty pleasure.
Considering all of the conflicts our generation is currently facing, I argue that it’s the wrong time to be overly concerned with taking up too much space or inconveniencing others. While interrogating my friends about their birthdays, nearly every single one of them had a fond memory of a childhood birthday. Whether it was an elaborate themed party or a quiet moment with friends and family, there was good in birthdays past. To me, this is proof we all harbor some secret desire to make a deal out of blowing out our candles.
I can't wait to say, "All my friends love their birthdays."
As my birthday quickly approaches, I am committed to starting a trend—a trend where we like our birthdays. In my efforts to reclaim what I lost, I will celebrate my newly completed trip around the sun with the people I love sitting around me and an elaborate cake with twenty candles in the center. I resign from the days of single, lonely candles.
It’s my hope that my friends and generation who have so bitterly dismissed their days of birth might reconsider their previous sentiments. I hope they look at my elaborate cake with at least a little bit of envy, and that I get to watch more than just my birthday candles being blown out this year. I hope we not only reclaim our birthdays, but also the space we occupied as kids and use it to ask for what we truly want. I can’t wait to say, “All my friends love their birthdays.”
