A Birthday Unclaimed

In the quiet where celebration doesn’t quite fit.

I’ve always found my birthday to be… uncomfortable.

Not in the “I’m getting older” way. Not even in the “I don’t want to make a big deal out of it” way. More like… the ‘it feels foreign’ way. Like… putting on someone else’s clothes and pretending they fit. Or like being asked to perform a version of joy that doesn’t feel natural in any capacity. [And this year, I’m working hard on ending these performances in the places that I can. In being authentic, communicative, and showing up empowered with what fits, not what feels foreign.]

Anyway, there has always been something about being recognized for simply existing that feels off for me. I didn’t “earn” this day. I didn’t accomplish anything. I just… made it here. And while yes, I know that this year especially, surviving is a form of achievement, I’ve spent much of my life minimizing that truth. I learned early that it felt more comfortable to sideline myself, to be useful instead of visible, to show up for others and to downplay my own presence to stay unnoticed.

So when the calendar flips to my birthday each year, it historically brings with it a tension that I can’t quite shake.

This year, that tension has only deepened. My awareness, my recovery, my coming back online in full - it’s attuned me to my own awareness, my own belief system, my own internal vibrations. My body feels it when my brain is off. My body holds memories deeper than I can recall. That’s something Ketamine is still helping me to work through.

For six years now, my daughter’s birthday has fallen just four days before mine. Due June 8th, 2019, she came rearing into the world loudly and proudly on May 9th instead - filling a solid four days each year with a plethora of feelings in her coming of age, Mothers Day, and my own birthday - and oh, how my heart expands and contracts and feels and motions and moves and silences during that season.

If I’m honest, her day has become the day. The one that holds weight. The one that feels joyful and sacred and worth making a big deal over. Her birthday marks the day I became a mother. It marks hope and healing and miracle and mess, all wrapped into one tiny human who now bounces through the world with sparkle and spunk and a heart bigger than her body.

Celebrating her?

That makes sense.

That feels holy.

But Me?

I’m just… here.

Still standing.

Still waking up every morning trying to piece myself together again.

Still fighting for some version of healing.

Still learning how to live inside a body and mind that don’t always feel like mine.

But.

If I’m going to acknowledge anything this year, it’s not this one day on the calendar.

It’s this season.

This stretch of time that has carved me open and asked me to survive, again and again and again. This last year has been the hardest of my life. Full stop. And while I might not want a cake or balloons or a brunch reservation, I do want to mark the fact that I’m still here.

That’s worth something. Maybe everything.

I just don’t want to celebrate it under the guise of “birthday.”

Instead, I want to honor it gently.

In quiet moments.

In scribbled journal entries.

In whispered conversations with the people who held me through the unraveling.

I want to recognize the resilience without needing applause.

I want to name the survival without needing a spotlight.

So if I seem a little awkward this week, a little distant or hard to read, it’s not that I’m ungrateful. It’s just that I’m still figuring out how to exist in a world that wants to celebrate me before I’ve learned how to celebrate myself.

Still, I’m here.

And maybe, for now, that’s enough.