Did You Have a Terrible Birthday This Year?

My birthday highlighted how little I’ve accomplished in the past 16 months. You?

Photo by author. Candles from my cake.

Yesterday was my birthday. For weeks I’d had a feeling of despondency and sadness. It perplexed me because what did I have to feel sad about? Or maybe a more correct way to put it was: what did I have to feel sad about that had just happened in the previous few weeks? Nothing.

But the approaching birthday tugged on my sense of what I wanted in life and it felt bad. This wasn’t even a milestone birthday, so what the hell was going on?

Yesterday a friend gently reminded me that the pandemic has made everyone’s lives worse (with a few exceptions) and caused widespread depression and anxiety like we’ve never seen. It’s across the country and across the world, across generations and across class. It’s no surprise that I feel bad.

Another friend nailed down the point: lots of people are having terrible birthdays this year.

For a few minutes of an otherwise a nice evening, I wept like a Magdelene during my celebration last night. I remembered all the areas of my life that feel like failures (relationships, career, money, weight, health, self-esteem, general contentment in life) and I broke down. A friend held me for a minute while others…