🎂 38: Happy Birthday to Me… Finally

I thought I was turning 37 instead of 38 lol. That should tell you something about where my head has been this year. 

This year is different. Everything is not fixed (maybe arguably extremely bittersweet), but I finally stopped waiting for people to choose me; I started paying attention to who already had.

Here is what 38 is teaching me.

Conflict is not the enemy; Avoidance is

I grew up thinking the relationship wasn’t honest and authentic until I had my first fight with the person. I watched some people around me treat conflict like a grenade. However, I had always been in fight mode because of my CPTSD, but I was selective at best. I had better boundaries even if I wasn’t always the best at standing up for myself at times. 

But I have been in real friendships. Ones where we said hard things and came back to each other. Where the rupture was not the end, but rather the beginning of something more solid. The people who cannot tolerate being seen clearly, who turn accountability into a counterattack, or disappear when things get real is not a reflection of my delivery; that is a reflection of their capacity.

I am not too much. I have just been in too many rooms where people had very little space for the truth. I finally made peace with it after doing so much work on myself. 

I have been paying for my place at the table

This one took me a long time to see, and I am still sitting with it. This especially hurt after closing down the discord server I had made for my friends and theirs. 

Somewhere early on in childhood I learned that belonging required payment. Not money necessarily, but something more expensive: Usefulness. I made introductions. I opened doors. I advocated for people. I held people through their spirals. I got people jobs. I showed up on Saturdays. I made myself indispensable because some part of me believed that without all of that, I was not worth staying for. Being useful was the price of admission I thought I had to pay to have any relationship with another human being. 

The strategy worked as people stayed, but unfortunately a specific kind of person stayed many times. It was the kind who read my generosity as unlimited access rather than as a gift with a giver still attached. They took everything I gave, and forgot I was the one who gave it to them. I was always attached to what I gave. They just stopped seeing me as attached to it. They stopped seeing me as a human being with needs and wants. 

Generosity is one of the best things about me, and I am not interested in becoming someone who withholds. However, there is a difference between giving freely and giving as payment. One comes from fullness, while the other comes from fear. I have spent a long time giving from fear and calling it love. Likely due to my childhood trauma, CPTSD, and battle with abandonment issues. 

The friend job posting I published recently (yes, I literally wrote a job posting for friendship, which you can read on this blog here) is me trying to do it differently. Trying to name what I bring and what I require before the door opens. I wanted to let people earn access to my generosity rather than offering it upfront and hoping they stay.

It felt strange to write. It also felt like the most honest thing I have done in years.

Birthdays have never felt like mine

Here is something I have not said out loud before: I found out as an adult that neither of my parents actually wanted children. Each of them told me the other one did. The truth, somewhere between those two stories, is that I arrived into a household where my existence was not something either of them had fully chosen. My mother told me she could not wait for me to move out. She started saying that when I was five. When I got older, my father told me my mom wanted kids, not him (lie); the other story was from mom who said my father wanted kids as she wanted to get her “tubes tied” instead (but couldn’t due to misogynistic laws back then needing my father’s signature). My favorite part is when I heard my least favorite grandmother told them to use contraception so they didn’t get pregnant. Great times.

My birthday was never really mine. It was an occasion for other people’s feelings, performances, and needs. My mother found ways to make it about her. My father, one year, sent me a birthday card, where he had put old photos of himself inside. On my birthday. A card full of his own image, sent to celebrate me. Those are just a few examples out of the 38 years I’ve been alive. 

When the people who are supposed to say “you matter simply because you exist” make your birthday about themselves instead, you learn something. You learn that presence alone is not enough, that you have to earn the room you were brought into, and that love is conditional, so you had better figure out what the conditions are.

I spent decades trying to figure out what the conditions were. Things I’m still unlearning (and brought into my adult relationships with people).

This year my birthday is mine. Not because everything around it is perfect, or because the right people will remember, or because the grief has cleared. It’s because I am deciding it belongs to me regardless of any of that. That is new, and it is uncomfortable. It is also the most honest thing I can do. I’ve thrown others many birthday parties and custom cakes; it’s time for me to take care of myself for a change. 

The people you build with are not always the people meant to stay

I have lost more people this year; people I was not even given the chance to fight for directly, sidelined in my own friendship, while others decided its fate. People show you who they are across time, not just on the good days.

I spent years building what I thought was a community. Friend circles, shared history, group chats, inside jokes, game nights. This year I had to reckon with how much of that structure was held together by my effort and my goodwill rather than genuine reciprocity. That kind of grief does not have a clean name. It’s not a breakup (unless it is like some have chosen). It’s more like realizing the house you thought you lived in had a different floor plan than you thought. That grief runs deep, especially knowing how much work went into building that community. From in-person game nights long before the server existed, to everything we tried to create online.

I am grieving that, and trying to rebuild at the same time. It’s messy and non-linear and very much where I am right now.

Grandma Jean would have remembered

My grandmother, Jean Elizabeth Warren, always made my birthday feel like mine. She is gone now, and every July I feel her absence differently. This year it is quieter, but also heavier somehow. I carry her with me close to my heart.

I think about her when I feel alone most days, which sadly do include my birthday. I think about her when I wonder if anyone will just show up without being reminded. She did not need reminding, especially with how my other folks and even parents treated me. 

The ones who actually show up are enough

My partner remembered. My cats do not know what a birthday is but they were here. That’s everything to me, because they are everything to me. 

What 38 looks like

My Wiccan altar with a pic of Grandma Jean, this blog that I try to update, a psychological framework I built out of grief, and a master’s degree I earned in the middle of chaos. I’m also grateful to have a home I own, a partner who has never once made me feel like a side character, and our two fur babies who chose me as much as I chose them.

I also have a clearer picture than I have ever had of what I need from the people in my life, what I will no longer accept, and what it feels like when someone actually meets me where I am. I did not get here cleanly, as last year nearly took me out… but I am here.

Happy birthday to me and to Salem (turning 36 in human years), who has never once let me feel invisible. 🐾