Happy Birthday!

Birthdays can be polarizing. Celebrate like crazy or ignore it like crazy.

Often people take a day, a week or even a month to celebrate their birthday. I love that. Do you. Go celebrate how awesome you are. Take as much time as you need! Years ago I used to go out for a week straight around my birthday. Best week of the year!

On the flip side, there are a lot of people who don't want to make a big deal about it.  Eventually I got into a place where I didn’t want to celebrate my birthday at all. Damn you alcohol and addiction messing with my self-worth. 

The real question is why. Why don’t people want to celebrate their day?  Age, getting older, realizing mortality…not the most uplifting answers. My answer to why is not in that bucket.

A little book excerpt that touches on this topic, entry from May of 2020. Quick clarification about the book cadence and style, italics are actual journal entries and the normal font following is my response:

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May 31st,

“June next. With each year, there is a feeling of avoiding celebration. Due to not deserving and lack of friends. The lack of friends comes up often…It’s not really about the drinking, I just always come back to not having the friend base. It’s not completely true, but it’s overwhelming…its frustrating that these feelings also feel juvenile. Immature…grow up.”

My birthday is June 21st, and I have been steadily avoiding celebrating it more and more because I don’t think I have enough friends to do so. I’m afraid to be embarrassed with a small crowd, not having a good showing. This is something I have worked on but it was a driving force of my addiction. For a couple hours, I didn’t feel lonely when I drank. And that was nice. The other 20 hours of the day, different story.

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Short answer for me not celebrating my birthday: loneliness and embarrassment.

I didn’t want to celebrate my birthday because I was afraid of nobody showing up. I didn’t feel like I was worth celebrating. I didn't feel like I had friends to celebrate with.

I know, I’ll go ahead and say it…Mathias, take it easy on yourself.

Like most of my mental gymnastics, this is not grounded in truth. And like most of my struggles, talking about it takes the power away from what I have convinced myself of.

One of the many upsides to my sobriety is that I’m not as sad as I once was about my birthday. I know I have friends and I know they are loving and wonderful people! So wonderful that I’ll likely get a text or two because of this blog post. Thanks in advance for checking in. I appreciate you.

For those who understand what I’m talking about with the birthday feelings, please celebrate your birthday! You deserve to, I’m glad you were born and I’m glad you are reading this.

And for the record, I’m happy to celebrate my birthday this year.  Which is fun, because it’s tomorrow.  

Talk to you next week, 

- Mathias John