16. birthdays

make me feel special pls

It finally happened. After almost 13 years, I turned 31 in my childhood home. I left home at 18, fresh out of school and for the next decade and a quarter, I floated between several different cities on my birthday.

The College Birthdays had a pattern. For three years straight, my ex rallied all our friends to a restaurant or café close to our university, arranged for a cake and led me there in the guise of some made-up excuse. I always knew what was going on but feigned surprise to maximise my gratefulness for everyone who put in the effort. Those evenings were spent eating cake, digging into whatever food caught our fancy at the time, and just being around my chosen family.

The Hard Birthdays began after college.

For the first year after graduation, I continued to stay in my shared accommodation and had my roommates to celebrate with. The cake at midnight, the dinner in the evening, the stumbling home after a few towers of beers at a hip little pub, stealing Christmas decorations from the freshly decorated malls – the memories, though, slightly blurry, only ring with laughter and happiness with friends who I have long moved on from.

The ones after that were the hardest. The years that followed my 22nd birthday were, to put it simply, transitional. I floated between friend groups, moving from college friends to work friends to friends of people I dated to friends I met through Sofar to friends I made through other friends.

There was the 23rd birthday when my then-boyfriend didn’t pause his abuse because it was a special day. There was the 24th birthday which I have no memory of, except that soon after, I took a bus to Goa to meet my best friend.

Then, there was the 25th birthday – the loneliest of them all.

I was living with A, a person I had considered to be a good friend but that relationship had almost completely unravelled by then. They were close to my ex (who we now refer to as Garbage Man a.k.a GM 😏). And when the time came to pick sides after the breakup, everyone from that friend group including A had picked GM, even though we still shared a home.

Even after six full years, I still remember the crippling anxiety with which I waited for someone – anyone – to knock on my door at midnight, to wish me a happy birthday. I waited for my phone to ring but no one apart from my parents called. There was nothing but radio silence and I had a panic attack – my heart thumped against my rib cage, my head felt lighter by the minute, my breath heaved inside my chest, and I cried myself to sleep, feeling unworthy of love and care.

Throughout the day, the hurt that I felt swelled and grew bitter. At work, everyone and their wishes felt insincere. Contrary to tradition, there was no office cake for me. If there was an unpopularity contest, I was winning by and large. I kept counting hours till it was evening so I could leave for my trip to Gokarna where I was meeting my best friend for the long weekend.

I ended my quarter-life birthday in a semi-sleeper bus from Bangalore to Gokarna, feeling unloved and rejected. For the next 4 days, I drowned myself in a cannabis haze by the seaside to numb the hurt. I hated the idea of going back to normal life, with a childish rage against people who didn’t bother to make my day special by saying two simple words. That year as my consciousness floated after the fourth joint of the day, I swore to myself that I would never again be in the same place and would go to work on my birthday.

Six years since, I have never broken that promise, spending my birthday in a different city every year, building my own traditions and making new memories. I have been on a work camping trip, then in Ooty, Hamburg, Paris, Prague and Kolkata for the birthdays that followed. I have kept myself cocooned in a warm, little bubble where I don’t feel the hurt as intensely as I did at 25 if someone forgets to wish me.

I am aware of how self-important that sounds, and how entitled I must feel to demand everyone to celebrate me for a day a year. But the 25th Birthday left deep gashes in my heart that are hard to fill without new love and care. The anxiety never really goes away and while I try to convince myself of other people’s busy lives and priorities, the younger me still feels the pain of a missed wish, even if it’s only a little bit.

Guess, I should talk to my therapist. 🥲

Until next time, if you want to make me feel special, please recommend this newsletter to a friend,

Sanj 🫨

[Little bonus: My parents are the absolute cutest. Ever since I moved out of home, they always made it a point to wish me at midnight. When I moved 4.5 hours behind their timezone, they set an alarm at 4:30 AM IST every year to call me at midnight German time. No amount of scolding can make them wish me at Indian midnight and get a full night’s sleep.

This year, my dad ran around putting on a shirt at 11:56 and mum brought out the cake she had hidden and then put trick candles on them as they and Alex sang happy birthday at exactly midnight. My mum clicked photos and my dad sang along as I cut the cake and struggled to put out the candles.

Did I say that I am incredibly grateful to have spent this birthday with them after so many years?]