Nelda John, Birthday Blues

Birthday Blues

Nelda John

The 28th of November is approaching, which means a new year is about to start for me. Unlike previous birthdays of mine, which were preceded with meticulous planning and bank-breaking shopping, this year’s is being announced by a slow wind of ambivalence. A gentle whisper that slithers up my spine and into my ears. “Birthdays are not supposed to be celebrated,” it says. That birthdays are no cause for personal glorification is an unorthodox perspective, even for me. I have always believed that it is not only right but also reasonable to acknowledge one’s commitment to dealing with a year’s worth of earthly ups and downs. One thing is obvious to me: the gift of life is as precious as presents can get yet as heavy as weight can contain. So when people gather to sing the birthday song, they are basically saying, “Well done for your resilience these past twelve months. Good luck in your next dozen adventures”. Because that is what birthdays are, commencements of 12 new moons, each one carrying its own tricks and puzzles that we can never fully prepare ourselves for. It’s only fair that we all get fresh starts, or at least that’s how birthdays pose; as new leaves, blank canvases, clean slates, empty pages. Are they though? Because as I contemplated this carefully, it occurred to me that perhaps birthdays are more endings than they are beginnings.

When one celebrates their, say, twenty-second birthday, they are not beginning their twenty-second year on earth, but rather ending it. Think of it this way, when we celebrate a baby’s first birthday, we do so only after they have completed one full year on earth, and by doing so, we are simultaneously acknowledging the ending of their first year. This baby earns the title of a “one-year-old” only after having experienced the risks and rewards associated with a human’s first year outside a

woman’s womb. So one-year-olds, in this sense, are little humans who have moved past breast milk, can handle some solid food, sit up, and comprehend, or sometimes, even form the words “mama,” “dada,” or their equivalents. Unless developmental challenges arise, a typically advancing one-year-old is one who has conquered this set of behaviours and is therefore ready for the next set that will qualify him or her as a twoyear-old. By their second birthday, toddlers are usually able to string two words together, pick up on others’ hurt emotions, walk and run, etc. And the cycle continues, with each one of their years bringing with it newer obstacles to tackle and rewards to receive upon successful completion of that course. Because of this, there is almost always a cause for frolicking and carousing on one’s birthday, because that recognises the birthday boy’s or girl’s forbearance of the weight of their life’s circumstances.

This is the reasoning I presented to my saboteur, who has been emboldened lately to let me know otherwise— that if we were sensible, or rather, the more sensible we become, the less reason there is to be delighted about birthdays. Our lives take shape within the constraints of time, and because of that, each step we take further from our actual birthdate is also a step closer to our death date. It’s almost as if each bite of our birthday cake and blow of our birthday candles is an acceptance that our time on earth is running out. That our piggy bank of hugs, kisses, and gifts that we yearly solicit from our friends and family is getting heavier and will soon explode right in our faces. That is no cause for celebration. When reflected upon, our birthdays are reminders of our mortality, flag posts that group and mark our yearly accomplishments while also pointing out our annual lapses. Sometimes they are bedazzling that they hypnotise me and keep me stuck in a lyrical loop that sings to me,

Joan of Arc was just 17 when she went to war! Cleopatra was 18 when she became the queen of Egypt! Greta Thurnberg is only 19 and look at her impact in the climate change movement! When Mary Shelley was 20, she was already writing “Frankenstein”! Kylie Jenner became a billionaire at 21! Taylor Swift was 22 when she sang her song, 22!

And you are turning 23 in a few days.

Another year is ending and my only reason to celebrate is that I might be getting another chance to make something out of my life. So if I should celebrate the beginning of this new year, I must discount the ending of my current age, then and only then will I have a proper justification for holding a 58 USD cake in Magnolia Bakery’s cart. Yet this feels like limited thinking, even to me. It’s like licking the ice cream and throwing away the cone (how savage!). Because, at the expense of sounding cliché, birthdays are two-sided coins, I cannot appreciate my beginning a new age without doing the same with the completion of my current one.

I hope it is as weird of a thought to you as it was to me when I first landed on it. I have wrestled with this throughout this last week, and I realised that this concept of finales and onsets coexisting in a single entity is not unprecedented. It is true that for everything under the sun, every beginning is also an ending and every ending is also a beginning. The beginning of a child’s life outside the womb is the ending of a woman’s pregnancy period, the ending of a romantic relationship is the beginning of one’s season of singleness, the beginning of watching a Netflix show is the ending of one’s proper grip of time, the ending of a wash cycle is the beginning of a drying cycle, the beginning of a butterfly’s life is the ending of a caterpillar’s, the ending of a flight is the beginning of long airport

waiting lines, the beginning of the sprouting of a plant is the ending of the bareness of the piece of land on which it grows, the ending of sleep is the beginning of being awake, the beginning of a painting is the ending of the innocence of a canvas ... yet if all canvases remained bare, just how empty would our museums be? And I don’t have to go down the list again to convince you that it is fitting that our world has a rhythm of simultaneous beginnings and endings. It is this way so that there is never a blank moment in our lives. Such that there is never not a reason to pull out our cone hats and our sashes and to bask in the unsynchronized voices of our dear ones as they too, join in on the chorus of praising us for our perseverance despite life’s inconsistencies.