I used to consider everyone’s birthdays to be super important, sacred even. I’d go out of my way to make anyone feel special on their birthday. But eventually I realized that literally no one puts in the amount of effort for my birthday that I put into theirs. Not even close. So now I’ve soured on birthdays and find myself bothered when people in my friend group go all out for some other friend’s birthday and then barely remember mine.

My birthday is on New Year’s Eve, so at most I get an afterthought shoutout during someone else’s NYE party. I almost never want to do anything at all for my birthday anymore because I know I’ll never get the birthday celebration I want unless I do all the work, and even then people are unlikely to show up because it’s the end of the year, they have NYE parties to attend, everyone’s tired from Christmas, etc etc etc. I’ve tried celebrating my birthday as far out as 2 weeks on either side, and it doesn’t help. Other friends in the group have birthdays within that time frame on either side, they’re more central to the group so people want to attend their parties more, and none of them want to attend two birthday parties in rapid succession. I often feel like the only way to get people to want to attend my birthday party is to throw a joint one with a core member, but that’s bittersweet because I know people are showing up for them, not me.

I’m at a point where not only do I not enjoy my birthday, I don’t enjoy NYE either and the end of the year just makes me feel bitter. Maybe it’s that I’ve only ever had shitty friends, maybe it’s that I’m awkward, maybe it’s simply that a massive combination of factors make it so that I happen to have the most unfortunate birthday possible for someone who’s not popular and doesn’t throw fabulous NYE parties. Either way, I hate my birthday now and I wish I didn’t have one. Does anyone else relate?