I don’t remember much of high school, much less my birthdays then, but I spent 14, 15 and 16 500 miles from home in a place I mostly detested when I didn’t loathe it outright … around people I for the most part didn’t like if I liked them even that much. For 14 I was horribly homesick, for 15 I was well on my way to suicidal and for 16 I ought to have been hospitalized (it wouldn’t have done a lot of good, though; the cause of the suicidal tendencies was environmental, so being out of the hospital would have negated much of what good would have come from being out of school).
For 20 I was suicidal again and basically felt for a few months before and leading up to it like I’d done nothing of merit with my life. Helped a lot that I had probably my most anti-social (though you wouldn’t have known it from my board activity at that time) time ever; I went three weeks at one point without physically touching anyone. Try it some time. It’s not as easy as it sounds. I went from the time my mother dropped me off at school until the time she picked me up three weeks later for something. School was going down the toilet, my social life would have vastly improved if the same could be said for it, and I was in an apartment with several otherwise lovely bigots who occasionally enjoyed the very loud night when I was fully content to go to bed early.
For 21 I was miserable for most of the day (this was not quite a week after I’d met fizzy in person; given that we were engaged in November…). I had plans to drive down to see her for the weekend, but my car decided that wasn’t going to happen. At about 9 PM, give or take a bit, I thought I might possibly reach her house by midnight, and so technically be with her on my birthday. Suddenly my car started smoking and it was easily after midnight before she could get to me, 120 miles from where she lived. I spent midnight in a little hamlet that wished it were a coal town, waiting for her and having no clue what I was going to do. I ended up missing two and a half weeks of school, well on my way to flunking out (which was actually probably the best thing for me, all things considered).
I don’t celebrate my birthday now; my family has for the most part come to accept that in some form or another. My father makes veiled references to “the day I don’t celebrate”; one year he wished me a happy feast of the saint whose feast day is my birthday, and my sister was thwarted in her attempts to email me a happy 20th note by the fact that my inbox was full. I was not displeased with this at all. It’ll probably take a few more years for the vast negativity of the past several years to fade away.
I was due on September 11, and I doubt I need to explain the significance of that to anyone.
