The summer I turned 19 and Anna turned 20, we got very sunburnt at Epye beach, lying on damp towels over hard pebbles. I read Anna Karenina and she read Lady Chatterly’s Lover - two girls searching for love of different kinds. I’d just got back from that first grand summer in New York, and I was so full of joy and misery from the time spent I didn’t know how to keep it all in one body. Anna had just got her licence - three years pandemically delayed - and she careened us down the country roads of her childhood, 1989 on CD at a very unsafe volume. She stroked the half-dried, salty hair off my face when I cried on my birthday.
‘Oh sausage,’ she had said softly, and I felt the fierce love for her that I felt for my sisters.
My eyebrows were still bleached then (another remnant from New York), and I loved the way they changed my face. I don’t like to recognise myself in the mirror, and I was just making the transition from dressing to appear attractive and dressing to look funny. Anna was the catalyst for that shift, with her gargantuan wardrobe spanning back through thousands of women’s lives. I was sorry and glad when they grew back in over the winter - there is comfort in familiarity, even if the familiarity is ugliness.
There is an imagined, constructed and then actualised audience to whom I present the slobbering, slavering mess of flesh and bruise that I become on my birthday, on any occasion in which I am given attention that has not been earned. I offer up the wound and I ask for my sins to be absolved. I’m asking - What do you think? Do you think the sadness makes me more attractive? Does she seem more romantic because she’s crying on her birthday?
The hatred for my birthday is not because I’m scared of aging – although of course, like every ill-adjusted young woman, the thought does fill me with a healthy amount of dread. There is of course, the childhood tradition of setting yourself up for total disappointment. Lofty expectation that makes you crash down into a toddler tantrum. I cry always though, I cry at everything, so crying doesn’t hold that much significance. Birthday cries are always the greatest release. Curled up by myself in a foetal position, snot and spit bubbling out various facial orifices, with a room full of people waiting to celebrate me not far off. It’s such a delicious form of self-hatred.
Each summer is a terrible thing because I am a terrible thing. Each summer on my birthday it returns and returns. I was born under a full moon. Sometimes I think this is why it’s there. This animal sits curled up somewhere inside, deep in the pit of my stomach, wound around my bones for as long as I can remember. It’s the animal that told me I should jump out that window when I was nine. The animal that took over through my teenage years and blacked most of it out. It’s very, very thin, almost emaciated, because it is always so hungry. It has fur in clumps, falling out always, bones that stick out, ribcages you can see through. It is blind. Sometimes it has six legs, jutting out at odd angles, and sometimes it has three, limping along, trailing blood behind it. Its tail is barbed and scarred and burned. Always, always, it has large, yellowed teeth. Rows and rows of them, gnashing biblically. It’s the animal that that makes me treat people with such savage violence. The animal that must be hidden, pushed down into my pelvis, and the animal that comes around each year on my birthday. When I was younger, it had more control over me, so there was less power to be held on my birthday. But as I moved out of adolescence, and got better at squishing it down, the pressure built.
The summer I turned eighteen I walk into Ronnie Scott’s with undiagnosed COVID for a dinner for my father’s birthday. I feel disgusting. My head is heavy, filled with congested snot and spit. My sister asks if I am really going to wear that. I look disgusting. My parents make me get a cab with them, and I sit in between them. I am disgusting. The air is taut with tension I cannot understand, but I am so wrapped up in this raw, festering wound of a feeling that I don’t realise what’s happening until too late. Waiting for me at the jazz bar are six of my closest friends in the world. Six friends who I had all individually sat down throughout that summer and asked if my mother was planning anything like this. Six friends who had assured me that she hadn’t. Six friends I had made promise that they would never pull something like this on me.
I smile at my parents, who go sit with my siblings at a different table. I sit down and proceed to have a panic attack so violent in both intensity and length, that I surprise even myself. I cry for two hours, hunched over in the back of the jazz club, over the saxophonist’s set. My girlfriend at the time asks if I wouldn’t mind being a little quieter. Simon orders a £100 bottle of champagne. Darcey is the only one who shows mercy, who takes me to the bathroom and says ‘Hey, do you want me to get you out of here? We can just leave if you want.’ And I do. I want so desperately to go, more than anything. I am so angry I can’t even begin to articulate such a whole and complete betrayal. From every person I had thought understood.
I cannot leave. I am too scared of what they will do if I tell them how I really feel. My parents are terrified of the person I am becoming and are blindly stabbing in the dark to appease me in any way, shape or form that they can conceive of. After the jazz club we have to go to dinner. I cannot do anything but sit and smile. I get horrifically drunk because I’m still technically seventeen and I don’t know any other way to cope. My sister’s boyfriend has been invited. I cannot believe I have to endure this humiliation in front of him. They bring me a cake with candles and I sprint, literally, physically sprint across a restaurant, away from the table until it is taken away. I thank my parents, again and again. I go home and I don’t sleep for three days. I just can’t seem to close my eyes. The animal keeps me awake, carving up my insides. It is bloated, huge, drool dripping from a gaping maw into my eyes, stinging them every time they try to close. I keep re-living the moment I walk in and feel the knife-blade of realisation slash through. I don’t speak to any of my friends for two weeks. I don’t really think any of them realised how close I came to just cutting myself away. It’s my therapist, really, who wants me to forgive them. Still, even now, none of them are allowed to bring it up with me. I still look back in sadness at those eleven people I held closest to myself who had so profoundly misunderstood who I was.
This is the sign that I have to stop, that this can never happen again. I stop giving out my birth date. I lie about my age a lot to new friends. I no longer spend my birthday with my family. I spend it alone. I keep everything very ambiguous. I give a month if pressed, but I never give the date. I make everyone delete anything put on a story. Flo once brought cake to the rehearsal of the play she was directing me in because I had told Facebook my birthday was a random day in November. I felt terrible for having lied about it online, but I couldn’t risk the real date.
My star-sign suggests this is a false protestation. A coquettish, oh, I don’t want a big fuss, while I secretly foam at the mouth for large, grand declarations of adoration from all those who know me. I don’t know how to convey to people that when I say that I don’t like my birthday, I am not being coy. I will not tell you when it is because I do not want you to know. I wish I didn’t. The attention is the worst part. I haven’t done anything. I haven’t earned it. I am still the same. Nothing has been achieved that is worth celebrating. It is another year wasted, spent on self-effacing abhorrence. No matter how much I try to tell my friends how I feel - not just traumatic childhood stories wrapped up with a dry punchline and writ reflection - how I really feel, it just isn’t possible. I try to, try to hold the animal in my arms. But it feels like giving blood. And I’ve never given blood. You cannot love anything that’s made of so much self-disgust.
The hardest thing about trying to be more vulnerable is that it doesn’t happen in a linear way. I agreed to throw a birthday party in May, and I spend the entire summer talking to everyone I know about it because I feel so horrific about it that I need constant reassurance. I am throwing a party, but I still give over to the animal on my birthday. My therapist says I’ve been making incredible progress this year. But I haven’t felt this anxious since I was twelve. No matter how I try, there is always the extra hour I wake up for. Nothing to do but wait and worry. I used to sing to myself when I was younger, trying to self-soothe. This summer I sit up in bed, with aching dread.
This summer I turn 21. On an undisclosed day, in an undisclosed month. I was abroad, mercifully. I am trying to be softer and so I spend it with my family, something I haven’t done since the eighteenth. My mother visibly wilts at the breakfast table when I give her photo album a cursory flip-through. ‘That took me hours’ she mutters to herself, and the animal snarls. I cannot look her in the eye. Ungrateful, stupid child. But I can’t look at the pictures of that girl, ordered through the years, smiling dutifully, pasted together painstakingly by the mother who loves her but will never understand her. I know how much I have failed us both. I fed the animal until it was stronger than I was. The girl doesn’t know that she will be choked out by it, that eventually, she’ll be asphyxiated if anyone looks in her direction.
‘You know, your birthday isn’t really about you.’ my dad says. ‘It’s for other people that want to celebrate you.’ but I won’t let them. Just pretend. It is so much easier. You have been doing it for years. I say nothing. It is attention I haven’t earned. My sister and brother have covered my bed in balloons when I return to my bedroom. ‘We did that ourselves,’ my sister says, when I return and refuse to comment on it. ‘We worked really hard on that.’ There is a silence. ‘Sorry.’ She manages, finally. I feel the animal sink its teeth deep through my arm, hitting bone. I am red raw. We go for dinner. This time there is no candles or cake. The sun goes down and I feel the panic surge up through my chest.
‘I’m sorry I’m so difficult,’ is what I end up saying in the garden, when we get back. ‘I’m really sorry I ruined it for everyone today.’
I cry hard in front of my parents, something I haven’t done since January, and my Dad puts his arm around me. This, it turns out, is what adulthood has ended up looking like. Crawling back into my father’s lap. He strokes my temple.
‘This is how your face was when you were little,’ he says. ‘You were so angry back then.’
On a random date in a different month, I have a birthday party. This is more or less unheard of. Everyone comes, much to my surprise. Some people come from a long way away. There are no speeches – I have begged the friends threatening me for no speeches – and there is no dessert. No happy birthday song. No mention of it. I am given, however, cards, and presents, much to my embarrassment and surprise. Twenty of my most beloved friends are caught in a biblical thunderstorm trekking back to my house for afters. Ronan somehow hooks up his decks to an old speaker of mine. He and Laith DJ, and everyone dances, and I wonder what kind of strange psychological trick I have pulled off to get everyone in this room to show up to a party that I’m throwing. My sister tells everyone when my birthday is, and I feel my throat close up for a second. It is the worst night of my life. It is the best night of my life. I want to kiss every single person in the room on the mouth. It is not, overall, a horrifying experience, though it is deeply mortifying to be known.
To have rewarding and fulfilling relationships with loved ones you have to allow yourself this. Being known, I think, is more than anything, telling the truth about yourself to another person. Usually the truth is nowhere near as glamorous as you hope. Writing about myself is, maybe an attempt to do so, and is easy in some ways (hungry for love, heavy with narcissism) and hard in others. (sub-tweeting friends and loved ones in the most insane way) But it is in a way, a striving towards the idea of being known.
Writing is a lot like throwing a birthday party, in that you invite a bunch of people into an incredibly intimate place to consider your personhood out of a personal obligation. It is asking to be seen, and therefore to be loved. It’s saying hey, I’m turning 21 and I’d like to be with you when I do, and then a terrifying hope that you will show up for me. It is not a linear process. I very rarely do any of these things (writing, parties, honesty) in a coherent way. It is messy and embarrassing - it is a mortifying ordeal to want this for yourself. I still hate my birthday, and I don’t think that will never change. But I love you, and I want you to know me. Even if I never quite end up being able to be honest, I can ask for your ear. The animal must be fed, but the hunger can be turned.
