My 24th Birthday

This post was written as a response to an email I got from a friend who felt much worse than she should have for having forgotten my birthday. I don't care. I don't remember anyone's birthday. I copied and pasted the majority of the email, which is the story of This Birthday Weekend, which I wrote to try to show her that regardless of her calling or emailing or giving me a card, there was nothing she could do to make it better.

Saturday, September 30
Oh my god, what a day. What a day of joy and relaxation and everything I ever could have wanted out of it. I told everyone I knew I just wanted alone time. Jessa was out of town, I told my other friends to not call me, and I got. shit. done. I finally did my dishes, I went through my closet, I have an entire storage bin/tub/thing full of clothes to get rid of, I vacuumed my bedroom, I picked up and organized my house, I watched a soccer game I have on DVD and have wanted to watch (Adam recorded the entire World Cup for me, how awesome is that?!), I fixed my bike, I pooped, I went out for coffee with friends early…It was awesome!

I felt so good. I felt so so good. It was all I really wanted, I’d even had one of those really-tired-turned-whiny moments on Thursday night on the phone with a friend where I went off and ended in a defeated and angry “All I want for my birthday is to be left the fuck alone for like, 4 hours; I just want some time where no one’s asking me for anything and I can do anything I want and it’s just a stretch of a number of hours just for me where I have nothing to do but whatever I want.”

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m really not the I-want-free-time-so-I-can-do-chores type o’ girl, but damn, I hadn’t had anytime for myself or my house or my space for months. Stefania moved in and then Sarah stayed with us for stretches as long as a week at a time and I ONLY HAVE A SMALL, ATTIC, ONE BEDROOM APARTMENT! Ahhh! They’re my family, so that’s what you do for family when they have nowhere else to live/stay/be, but damn, I wanted some time.

It was great. I still have a lot of errand-y type things left to accomplish, but it felt so good to not have all those things hanging over my head any longer. Wow.

Then 11:20 pm rolled around. It turns out I hadn’t planned my time as well as I thought. I was relaxed, in my jammies, watching TV on my couch and about to go to bed when I realized that I didn’t really want to turn 24 all by myself. Yes I had wanted alone time, but I didn’t want to be sitting at home alone when midnight rolled around. I called a couple of people to see if they were already out and I would have just joined them for a beer and then gone back home—cuz I was really tired and did want to go to bed—but who wants to say and remember that when her birthday turned she was at home alone watching shitty TV in her stained sweatpants? I have too many friends and too much love at this point in my life to go through that again.

Defeated, at about 11:40 I called Sarah (necessary background that I’m skipping on purpose for personal reasons: Stefania and I had already started our inexplicable, perhaps-friendship-ending fight we’re still in) to ask her to go out with me for a beer so I wasn’t not alone when my birthday turned. Of course she agreed and she and Caleb met me down at Shakespeare’s.

Sunday, October 1, 2006 (The Actual Day)
We sat awkwardly at a table trying to laugh at Caleb’s forced jokes while completely ignoring the pink elephant sitting between us on the table that was the Fight I’m In With Stefania. When Caleb got up to pay the tab so we could all finally leave to go home, I gave it a shot and told Sarah a bit about how much it hurt that I don’t get to have Stefania—I mean, it’s fucking Stefania—with me on my birthday.

We said our goodbyes and went outside to go home. We all three had rode our bikes, so there was another goodbye on the sidewalk. My bike was parked up the street and when I got down to their bike rack, Sarah had started crying her eyes out. I mean, I understand, I teared up when I was talking about Stefania, but I held it together. It was my birthday after all.

Caleb and I rode our bikes together all the way to my house (he lives a couple blocks past me), and he continued to tell me about the horrors that my fight with Stefania is causing on Sarah’s life, his life, the world in general…I’m not going into it.

I went inside and as I walked up my dark stairwell I had the thought: “Wow, I didn’t think it was possible, but this birthday really does rival my sixth grade birthday party where I spent the dinner portion crying in a restaurant bathroom and the night ended with my friends literally tackling one another in my dark backyard thinly veiled as a football-type game.”

It was depressing, but, amazingly, a couple steps up later, all was better and okay in the world. Really. I thought about that birthday party and I immediately realized that Marla DaVee—my best friend in sixth grade—was still in my life, and not only that, we were close enough friends that I could call her at that moment and laugh about the ridiculousness of that birthday party. Yes, that had happened, and damnit, I lived through it and here I am having another bad one, but I will also live through it, and hopefully in another 12ish years, I’ll get to call her up and say, yep, it’s time for another awful birthday. It just became this experience that I’ll get to laugh about later because, while it really does hurt now and I know the issues are real and matter, in 12ish years I’ll be exponentially better off that I am now, the same way I was exponentially better on this birthday—despite how shitty it was—than I was when I turned 11.

I went to bed and the next day was another series of disappointment, and added pain over this stupid thing with Stefania. Jessa got back into town about 8 hours later than expected, my soccer game sucked, I sat alone while waiting for the one late friend I had show up to dinner, I humbled myself enough to call Stefania to just let it go and have fun for the sake of my birthday and it was so painful and torturous trying in the park with Sarah and Stefania that after about 8 minutes I gave up and asked if they were ready to leave. Yes. Eight minutes. And there was even opening Sarah’s present in that time. Yeah, it hurt that much. No. It hurt more.

I hate holidays because those are the days when I have to count on others, and inevitably I am disappointed and let down. My life works well the way it is and my way of life is to care for others. On occasions when I’m supposed to be the one taken care of, I’m usually only ever hurt. (There was even more bullshit and pain that went down, but it’s the stuff that I don’t really tell anyone about. Holiday type events just hurt. And that’s okay. Because I have every other day of the year to be happy, and I rather it that way than the other way around.)