I hate celebrating my birthday.
When I admit this to people, they almost always ask why, and I typically point to my twelfth birthday, the only year after first grade when I had a party. We held it at Papa’s Pizzeria (now Old Town Pizza), and all the important people in my life at the time made appearances. Why I decided I wanted a party that year, I can’t say, but it was a good year for it: middle school separated the friend group I had throughout elementary school.
Because I hadn’t had a birthday party in years, my mom decided to mark the occasion and snap photos throughout. Most were pretty nondescript candids of us laughing over pizza or hammering away at a video game in the corner arcade, but when it came time to open presents, she took it as an artistic challenge to capture the joyous moments of discovery as I unwrapped gifts and found the treasures that awaited inside.
Most of these shots turned out well, my round face smiling as it regards a Beanie Baby or a book about The Simpsons, but one photo did not. As I opened one of the final gifts, I found inside something I couldn’t initially identify. As I lifted the object out, I struggled to make sense of it right at the precise moment my mom pressed the button on her camera.
Eventually, the gift-giver explained that it was a diorama of Han Solo negotiating with Jabba the Hut. Like so many people, the giver had assumed I loved Star Wars and found me a little trinket celebrating the series. Little did he know I wouldn’t truly love anything Star Wars until Daisy Ridley and John Boyega joined the cast—both were five years old that year—so it wasn’t a gift in my wheelhouse.
Still, good kid that I was, I understood the “it’s the thought that counts” principle, so I praised the item and expressed gratitude before opening another gift. No big deal. The giver would be none the wiser to my ambivalence toward what he’d chosen and wrapped for me.
My mom had the photos developed a few days later and handed me the envelope to look at. She expected me to revel in reliving this lovely moment of celebrating my birthday with familiar faces at my favorite restaurant while back in Elk Grove, but my reaction to those snapshots proved anything but positive.
Smack in the middle of that stack of 4x6s sat a photo from when I’d withdrawn that Star Wars diorama from its packaging. I hadn’t yet figured out what it was, so I was perplexed by what I had in my hands.
And the confusion showed on my face.
I looked like I had just caught the scent of a rotting corpse. My captured expression borders on indignant, as though an odd gift offended me at a sixth-grade birthday bash. My memory had me responding well following that moment of confusion and convincingly conveying appreciation for the gesture, but that photo presented evidence otherwise. What if the gift giver had seen that expression? I would have been crushed if the gift I picked out for someone had put that look on the recipient’s face. That look screams “Failure!”; it’s the kind of look that, on a friend’s face, would haunt adult nightmares decades later.
Indeed, that photo’s perfect capture of the maximally damning moment haunted me. It didn’t matter that the giver never showed any sign of concern—we remained buddies through high school graduation—because that photo proved that it was possible to pinpoint a moment like that. From then on, I needed to be hyper-vigilant when receiving gifts around people; I couldn’t risk a generous offering ending a friendship or wounding someone I cared about.
Birthdays bring gifts, and gifts deliver risk. Producing displays of appropriate appreciation fills me with apprehension; I have to be authentic since people who know me will pick up on synthetic sincerity, but I also have to say the right thing or risk seeming ungrateful. For years, I practiced smiling in the mirror before birthday dinners, carefully calibrating my expression. I couldn’t let another Jabba-and-Han situation happen.
Naturally, this made celebrating my birthday a stressful experience. My performance holds the highest stakes; every gift I receive marks my Julliard audition, everything terrifyingly on the line. Will I say the right thing? Will I look convincingly moved? Will the person walk away proud of their generosity or ruined by my reaction?
I hate celebrating my birthday because I hate the stage work accompanying it.
So that’s the story I typically tell when I admit to a distaste for being the birthday boy. I point to that photo of receiving that gift and admit the experience left a little scar. It’s a cute story about a twelve-year-old at a pizza parlor opening presents. People like that story. Sometimes, they laugh, just like when I talk about hating Santa Claus.
Confession time: that story is true but incomplete. That moment did scar me, and it does stir anxiety in me whenever someone presents me with a present. Everything I’ve shared has been real.
The lie was my very first sentence. I don’t hate celebrating my birthday. I hate my birthday period.
Because my birthday makes me wish I was dead.
I’ve interrogated this phenomenon many times before; I’ve done it so often enough that I know I can’t explain it. A part of it speaks to the performance aspect I’ve already described, because I am miserable on my birthday right when people want me to be happy and smiling and feeling loved, so the dissonance between my internal emotions and what pleasing them makes me feel collides two fronts with sufficient violence to harken a hurricane. My birthday brings me down, and people trying to compel me to be up only amplify that feeling. My birthday is quicksand: the more I struggle against it while trying to be happy, the deeper I sink.
That’s not the whole thing, though. I’ve written six different versions of this paragraph, but I keep deleting them and restarting, which speaks to how impervious to rationality this feeling is. I’m going to gift myself a reprieve and let me stop trying to justify this fact of existence: no matter what causes it, no matter what thought, feeling, or person fires it up, I feel it. There’s this intense claustrophobia that surrounds me around my birthday, and I want out. I want it over.
As a senior in high school, I interpreted this as a desire to run away. I’ve told this story before: I planned to drive to Washington upon turning eighteen and escape my lonely life. I chickened out, went to school with my head hung instead, and ended up with a class throwing me a surprise party. That was a special day, no doubt—genuine smiles all around—but the feeling of malaise didn’t disappear in the days that followed. Eventually, it did, but not until my birthday was in the rearview mirror.
When I reread my thoughts from that week, I see through the illusion: I called what I wanted to do on my birthday “leaving”, but the letter I wrote announcing my intentions reads like a suicide note. It even invokes suicide in its very first paragraph. More astoundingly, it expresses thoughts that have echoed through my head every March since with language that doesn’t make sense but still plays in my head:
There's nothing wrong, there's no terrible thing that forces me to leave. On the flip side, it is that my life does not change and it is this staticisity that compels me to move forward. I do not enjoy all the stress, all the emotional pain, all the loneliness, all the using, all the blame, all the nights of sound sleep when my mind continues to work and hence I wake up more tired than before. I need to escape from all of this. I am not made to be alone when surrounded by people, so it seems more efficient and painless to be alone when surrounded by no one.
Just look at that last line. That desire “to be alone when surrounded by no one” rather than “alone when surrounded by people” speaks to that equilibrium I often seek, an idea channeled even by the performance anxiety of pretending to be happy on my birthday. Later on, I say, “I am simply exercising the escape clause in my intangible contract for life,” and I see the words “escape” and “contract” and find familiar phrases from my first draft of this piece…that I wrote without referencing that nearly twenty-year-old letter. I haven’t looked at it since I wrote it.
“The only path for escaping myself is to leave myself behind” closes the second-to-last paragraph, and although I finish that sentence with “and begin anew”, the final paragraph calls into question what I meant. “I regret my transgressions and beg for repentance,” I write before typing out the Lord’s Prayer in its entirety.
I should explain why this calls into question what I meant: I recite the Lord’s Prayer to this day, but only when I reach the edge.
Each birthday, I get a little bit older, but the words stay the same. And those words remain the same because that part of me that wants to die never goes away. It’s always there, a slinking slug sunk in the corner of my mind. It hides in shadows, but it has never left me. Dexter had his dark passenger, and I have mine.
When my birthday arrives, that slug, emboldened, blows out my candles.
Most years, I feel it as this non-verbal dread. A lethargy, an existential fatigue squeezes my emotions, and I become morbidly philosophical. I put on blue-colored glasses and condemn everything about my life. Living feels cruel; I twist everything around me into its least charitable interpretation. My heart feels sluggish, my body chemistry breaks down, and my blood coagulates into a depressive cocktail that eats me emotionally from the inside out. People amplify it; they conspire to deliver joy, but the slug takes offense to that and creeps further out, challenged to reassert its hold on me. And time keeps on ticking forward, tick tick tick tick, and the slug grows larger with every hand movement on the clock, the proximity to that day cranking up the noise.
[[ I went back to the letter just now and read the middle: “Please forgive me…I have been a parasite to those I love: rejoice now that I have passed.” I even called myself a parasite, an organism evocative of, well? Of a slug. ]]
Okay, reset, refocus. I’m doing that thing again where I spiral while writing. I’ve been so tight in 2024 with what I’ve published, so purposeful and generous, but I’m losing that part of myself. There’s something mesmerizing about this twenty-year-old letter I wrote and finding it both foreign and familiar, both ancient and current. This is first contact, this is a point of origin, this is the font of my vocabulary for understanding this harrowing part of myself that especially flares up on my birthday but that always lies in wait in the back of my head. This is me, in real-time, trying to process it for whatever benefit that can bring. I’m leveraging this
I’m doing it again! I’m losing my train of thought as a million others spiral around my head. There’s only one way forward, then: hard reset. Here it is.
Ahem.
Revisiting the origin point of my birthday morbidity might be terrifying for someone to read. There’s a reading of all this that says, “This person is not stable”, and while I won’t begrudge you your reading, I’m not that. I become less stable at times, certainly, including but not limited to the window around my birthday, but I’ve learned to resist these fatalistic feelings.
Think about it: I have celebrated nineteen birthdays since my eighteenth in 2004, and I’ve overcome that slug every time. The slug slithers into my thoughts several times each year, especially during high-stress moments, and I’ve batted him away every time. I have much experience sword-fighting with this slug, and my record is pristine.
Nonetheless, there is suicidal ideation baked into the rhythm of my thoughts. The slug never disappears; he’s always lurking. I won’t pretend otherwise, and I understand that’s not what someone wants to read. It wasn’t something I ever wanted to admit, either.
That changed. A mentor once sat with me in the dark while I was in crisis. While calmly talking with me, she acknowledged that she has her own slug.
“It never really goes away,” she said to me with the same matter-of-factness she might multiply two polynomials. “It’s always there; it’s always an option. I had to accept that and make peace with its presence.”
What some people might have heard from her was “You’re never going to get better” but I did not. I heard that my slug will stay with me until the end, but my slug doesn’t have to be my end. I heard a rallying cry to adjust my equilibrium to account for that slug, to factor the parasite in and acknowledge its slimy presence rather than cower in fear of it.
The other thing I heard was the voice of a survivor. She, too, had thought those thoughts, yet there she sat directly across from me, twenty-five years deeper into a lifetime of victorious battles. How many times had she defeated her slug? Who cares. She’s undefeated. She is alive. So is her slug, but why bury the lede? SHE’S ALIVE. She still is—we texted on Friday. Again: SHE IS ALIVE!
And so am I. I, too, am undefeated. That haunting letter in 2004 didn’t mark my end, and neither have the nineteen birthdays ever since nor all the other moments that saw my slug attack from its shadowy lair. The slug has never beaten me. All those years when I felt like such a loser, I ignored that I win the most crucial battle all the time.
Which returns me to my point: the battles. Every battle, whether birthday or otherwise, is a little bit different. That’s a feature, not a bug, by the way—what a boring game life would be if every stage played out the same. But it bears repeating: every battle is different, meaning every win plays out according to unique rhythms.
Some years, my victory comes via quiet reflection. During college, I’d lay in bed and talk myself through all the reasons to be alive. One year, I got up and wrote out a lineup card for opening day, despite the game being weeks away and not yet having met my team, and that did the trick. Another year, I paused the fight to read a book, telling myself I’d return to the battlefield after a few chapters. There was also a year where I blasted Max Richter’s “On the Nature of Daylight” as loudly as possible into my ears, hijacking the ponderous piece that closes Arrival into fuel for a similar blue-tinged conclusion. And in 2020, I flatly insisted it wasn’t my birthday, and I spent a day in denial until my final Zoom session ended.
Over the last few years, I’ve found a sustainable strategy: taking a Mental Health Day. I’d never dared consider one until 2021 when a student shared during a Therapy Thursday that a recent absence had been just that. I took my first one the next quarter and marveled that the slug shrunk when giving myself space. Inspired, I decided to observe my birthday with one the following spring, and 2022 saw the softest skirmish yet.
Last year, in 2023, I repeated that strategy—I even bought myself a cake from Raley’s. Still, 2023 saw me wage my most brutal battle in years. There’s no explanation for why it went down like that; had I understood it, maybe I could have muted it more. The first version of this piece recounted that 2023 battle, but engaging with those thoughts again felt unhealthy, so I stopped. My point requires some context, so I’ll give you this.
I went to school on March 2nd already feeling the malaise. I entered the day actively looking for a reason to live, literally wearing that mindset like a costume, and I had the worst fucking day. When I got home, reeling, a rejection letter from a fellowship capped it all off. I was so distraught that I walked myself through the wellness questions my mentor had asked that time and that I sometimes ask students, too.
Going to bed that night, I half-slept restlessly; the battle continued. I hadn’t resolved the situation; I hadn’t defeated the slug yet. When I woke up the next morning, I wrote a piece in my Finsta about the previous day and the feelings, confident that putting them into words would defang them. This strategy almost always works.
It did not in 2023. The piece I wrote was bleak, the bleakest thing I’d written since that letter nineteen years earlier. So bleak were my thoughts that one of the two people with access to that journal reached out to check on me. This was less a battle than a war.
As I munched on waffles and half-watched my last Oscar nominee, I entered negotiations with the slug. This was an unprecedented move: was I conceding 2023 to him? In a way, yes—I was resigning from battle so he could savor his win—but he only agreed thanks to a video game promise. The war wasn’t over; we were simply preserving our lopsided score with a save state.
Per the terms of our contract, we would resume our confrontation one year later, on March 3, 2024. On that day, which happened to be a Sunday, we would pick up our fight where we left it off, but I would publish the transcript here, publicly. The title of this piece would match that of the bleak one I wrote mid-scuffle a year earlier. I would have to relive all of it again and fight anew from a disadvantaged position.
Like I said before, every battle is different. I don’t know going in what my weapon will be or which hero will join me on the front lines. Maybe that, too, should be terrifying, but I don’t feel like it is.
When I really get down to it, a simple pact with myself got me through last year. Forget the slugs and the imaginary battles, and forget about friends and books and cake and Taylor Swift—forget about everything else. What got me through last year’s birthday crater was a commitment to make a post here, on this day, titled “Volume 5, Entry 9: Cosplay”.
I know the title doesn’t make sense anymore, but it’s really, really important that I make it that. Such were the terms that set back the slug in March 2023, terms that I knew would get me to this point but terms that guaranteed nothing about how I would feel at this point. I didn’t know what I would say in this piece because I didn’t know if I’d be happy I was around to write it.
[[ Don’t worry, by the way. This isn’t more of the bleak. You get the happy stinger in 2024 that I couldn’t find one year ago. Enjoy it, like I will enjoy writing it. ]]
For the official record: I am.
And the slug’s going down tomorrow.
Again.
I’m willing to bet that this reads like gibberish to most of you, but this actively helped me this week. It really does feel like something is different, which is something.
Huge thanks to Michelle for both illustrations included here. When I sent the draft over on Tuesday, I felt convinced I had just sent nonsensical ramblings, but your artwork (and words!) let me feel safe knowing that my message got through to somebody. Posting this, with your artwork, makes me proud to press the button.
I’m so unbelievably beat that this is all I can offer. I have executed my plan. I’d love to record more remarks, but I’m afraid I’ve run out of time. If I do later, I will retroactively link them here.
In any event, thank you for reading—this and any other piece.
See you all next week.
I’ve never really liked celebrating my birthday either. And a big part of it is definitely having to put on a face and act like I’m happy and joyous around people when I’m not.
I’ve thought about why I don’t like it a lot as well, and some of it relates to your own experiences but I also find it is that I have all these expectations of myself (most of which are unrealistic) and my birthday is a reminder that I haven’t lived up to those expectations and that I now have one less year of life left to do so.
Either way, I enjoyed this piece :)