Birthday Blues... What, again?
I wonder how many people actually love birthdays and for how many people it’s a source of difficult and painful memories.
I fall into the second camp.
Growing up I had a love-hate relationship with my birthday, actually, it's been more like “I wanna love it but know that I'm going to end up feeling like rubbish by the end of it” type of relationship.
As such my birthdays have always been filled with the Triple-D of dejection, disappointment and depression. Any potential delight and hope of different almost always overshadowed by the inevitable pain and trauma that unfolded as the day progressed.
Even if I couldn't remember thinking it, I definitely remember holding the feeling within me wondering “if they couldn't even celebrate my birthday, what did that day about me?” So as almost every young child does, I made their inability about me. It was because I want’t good enough, worthy of being celebrated, loved enough, loveable, and worthwhile for them to care enough to try and make this day different to any of the other days I lived.
And so whilst I dreamed each year might be different, it never was and birthdays began to represent something more sorrowful for me - that I was unloved.
It didn’t matter who I was with or what I did, and soon it wasn't even just birthdays, it was all the other days in-between - I carried around in my body and my soul all the pain of unworthiness and not-enoughness, all the sorrow and heartache that it had stored up over the years.
Birthdays represented the ache and emptiness of love that I never knew yet hungered for and so unsurprisingly the day never ended without soul-wracking tears.
But this year I noticed something different.
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