Nasrin Sultana Shila –
When Mitu was a kid, her birthday was the best day of that year for her. She used to wait, plan, and even dream about her birthday throughout the year. She knew exactly what presents she wanted, which flavor the cake should be, and even the color of the balloons was important to her. Her parents also tried their best to make her birthday special by cooking her favorite food, letting her do all her favorite things, and fulfilling almost all of her wishes. Not only the immediate family, her friends, cousins, and children from the neighborhood, everyone seemed to be excited for her birthday, glad to be a part of the celebration and Mitu also enjoyed being the star of the day.
But things started changing as she grew older. She does not want a big celebration anymore as the big day makes her more concerned about how quickly she is growing old, how drastically she is changing physically and mentally (even though these are very natural!), how clumsily she carries herself, how dull and dry her hair is, how bad her study is going on, how ill-prepared she is for the future challenges in education and career and the list goes on.
To her, turning one year older does not seem like a big occasion to celebrate anymore, instead, it starts making her analyze what she has done in the last year compared to what she was supposed to do (hypothetically!). This has turned her birthday from a celebratory occasion to a dreadful event. The little girl who used to eagerly wait for her birthday to come is now trying to erase the day from her life by hiding it from everyone, trying the hardest to not make it a special day and even getting mad at the people who secretly try to plan any surprise party.
Things get worse on the milestone birthdays – 18th, 21st, 30th, 40th, and so on as she had planned to achieve things before reaching each of these milestones but life had another plan with her, not with so many others around her! All these things made the birthday a complicated, sad, exhausting slow guillotine toward an uneventful death.
Mitu’s case might sound “too much” to us as we are more used to seeing people happy and cheerful on their birthdays, but “Birthday Blues” is a real thing! Urban Dictionary defines it as “a general sadness or feeling down by a person on or around his or her birthday”. It can happen due to several reasons.
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Birthday may make one sad as it officiates aging, which is generally viewed as a negative thing. People want to be young and energetic, not old and weak. But we tend to forget that aging also indicates maturity and experience. As we grow up, we gain the authority to make decisions, become financially independent, and get more freedom to make our own choices.
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Milestone birthdays can be tougher as a society and we too have high expectations regarding those timelines. People plan to finish graduation by 25, get a job, get married within 30, have a big promotion, first kid, foreign tour within 35, and so on. When someone cannot achieve those things within that period, a birthday can become a terrible reminder of failure. Things get harder when people around that person successfully attain those goals and others tend to compare the differences. What we should remember is that, everyone has a unique pace in their lives. Binding our lives with some targets restricts the limitless opportunities that life presents us. Our world will be tedious if all of us lead our lives in the same way. It is the variations and the diversities that make our lives colorful. So, it is okay to be married at 21 and not at 31, it is okay to stay at home or explore the world, and it is okay to have a job or business. What is not okay is being sad before my birthday thinking that I am …. years old and I could not do what others have done by this age.
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As kids, we had less pressure and expectation in life. It was possible to celebrate our birthday at school or even miss a day at school to observe the day in our fullest form. But as we grow older, it becomes difficult to make this day special even if we want to. We cannot avoid an exam or miss an official meeting just because it is our birthday! This can make us feel less excited or even gloomy on our birthday and reluctant to celebrate it. But the truth is, it does not take much to make a day memorable. The good thing about a birthday is, it comes on a fixed date every year which makes it easier for us to pre-plan it! If you do not want to study on your birthday, prepare for the exam well ahead so that you do not have to take much pressure on that day. If you are a service holder, apply for annual leave on that day at the beginning of the year and pamper yourself the whole day or through a pizza party at the office and have fun with colleagues to take off the pressure at least for some time. If nothing can be done the whole day, try to have a nice dinner while watching your favorite movie, write about the blessings of your life, or reminisce about good old birthdays with a loved one. Who knows, after a decade, you might forget the big birthday parties but remember the cozy feeling of a movie night at home.
After reading all these, one might think that celebrating a birthday is a “must”. No, it is not! It is not mandatory to be happy and excited about your birthday. It is okay to not feel okay on a birthday, it is okay to treat it like any other day. Everyone has their preferences, so if anyone likes to keep the birthday to oneself and not let the world know about it, that is completely normal. But when someone wants to be joyful on his/her birthday but feels miserable due to not meeting society’s expectations of that age, that is not okay.
So, the birthday blue girls and boys all over the world, let us give a big shout-out to you just for lasting in this wild world for so many years! I hope that you will celebrate your next birthday with all the happiness and thrill of a toddler who just discovered how delicious a birthday cake is!
Nasrin Sultana Shila is an Industrial Organizational Psychologist, Educator, Author, and Content Creator
