Another Year, Another Existential Crisis - Polyester zine

A COLLECTION OF ESSAYS BY

By Celia Edell

In the weeks leading up to my birthday, it’s all I can think about.

Growing up, I used to count down the days on my calendar. Starting from over a month in advance, I’d carefully mark 35, 34, 33, 32… in each square until the countdown led to October 28th – circled in bright marker – and then, the 29th is blank. And the 30th is blank. Halloween cushioned me a bit, but nothing could prevent the birthday blues from setting in. And they always set in somewhere during my birthday, and continued for a while after.

The birthday blues have plagued me since fifth grade. I know this because 5th grade is when I started showing symptoms of generalized anxiety disorder. The same time I was having panic attacks before school every day. It’s the year when I started taking medication for anxiety.

Medication helped me go to school, in fact it still does as a PhD student now, but it has never remedied all of the anxious bones in my body. I still have a thing about planning far in advance, counting down until (seemingly) big events; I still have a problem with the aftermath of excitement, the come down. I still always get the birthday blues.

Why do I always get anxious and sad on my birthday? I wonder now if it has to do with anxiety about getting older, time passing faster, or the expectations I pile on myself. Nowadays I am aware of myself leaving my early twenties, I’m about to turn twenty-six and I only expect more from myself with each passing year. I expect myself to be all of the things I pictured I would be as a kid. I expect myself to achieve the perfection I demand from my work that is not possible or healthy. I expect myself to make my family and friends proud of me. I didn’t expect myself to feel lost at twenty-five, or scared, or like an imposter. Age as a number doesn’t scare me much, but growing up and finding my way does. So maybe that’s why I cry on my birthdays.

And yet, I know I wasn’t concerned with any of those things when I was nine. So it must be something else at the root of the birthday blues. It must be the anticipation. The build-up that simultaneously feeds my anxiety and soothes it; something to count down until, to distract my wandering mind with, something to look forward to. I’ve always needed

that. It helps me cope with the overwhelming anxiety about the vast uncontrollable future. But when that thing you were looking forward to comes and goes, quickly and in a way you can’t fully control, it feels like chasing a firefly until you’re finally close enough to catch it – but when you open your cupped hands it’s not there. Even if you’re surrounded by people who love you, all you can see is that little light disappearing into the distant darkness.

As dramatic as the birthday blues can feel in the moment and in this essay, I do have some perspective on how good I actually have it. I always celebrate my birthday with loved ones, I always get a gift (usually a heated blanket from my parents. Seriously, I’ve gotten three over the years). I always eat good food and have a really nice day because people are specifically aiming at making my day special. And that is so meaningful, and lovely, and I will still cry by the end of the day. This is such a well-known problem to my family that as a kid, my mom bought me a small gift box with seven pockets, one to open on each day after my birthday, to keep the birthday blues at bay for a bit longer. (I don’t even remember what was in the tiny pockets but I remember that it was the most thoughtful gift ever).

I guess getting over the birthday blues means accepting that good things will end. Every good thing ends. It doesn’t sound as comforting as ‘every bad thing will end,’ but it’s equally true. Ending, it turns out, is not the worst thing that could happen to something. A birthday could go on and on and lose its special quality. Or it could repeat like Groundhog Day while we consciously try to escape. It could also just be treated like any other day, to avoid disappointment when it’s over – but there’s no fun in that. I won’t let the blues stop me from celebrating another year I thrived, or a year I simply survived. I know there will be more of those. Maybe one day I’ll even stop getting these blues. Until then, it’s my birthday, I can cry if I want to.

By Daisy Jones

This time last year, I found myself sitting on my then-girlfriend’s bed in an old tracksuit as she told me she was breaking up with me. I don’t recall her exact words, but as her mouth was moving I slowly cast my eyes across the belongings we’d accumulated over four years, and noted our cat, who was sprawled at her feet, disinterested. Together, we then placed my toiletries and folded clothes into a bright blue IKEA bag-for-life, and walked in silence to my flat down the road, where we awkwardly hugged goodbye.

Once she’d disappeared from view, I screamed so loudly I saw white spots for a second, and then sprawled across my front garden and dry heaved into the grass.

Every twelve years, the planet Jupiter returns to the exact same position it was in when you were born.

Covered in stripes the colour of autumn leaves, and made up of various gases like hydrogen and helium, Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system.

Astrologically speaking, its presence in your sign signals luck and expansion, both of which can only truly bloom after you’ve been yanked away from the old way of doing things, and thrust into an entirely new mode of existence. In many ways, when Jupiter returns to you, it’s like being born again. I didn’t realise at the time, but on the same night my ex broke up with me, Jupiter was hurtling through space and into my sign, Libra, where it would remain for an entire year.* As with most break ups, ours had been a long time coming. We’d gotten together when we were teenagers, and as the years had piled up, our lives had become so intertwined it had been easy to forget who we were as individuals. We hadn’t touched each other in months.

I was no fun to be around. From the very beginning, there had been an indefinable anger brewing inside of me, a stormy lilac rage. When I looked at myself in the mirror, all I saw was an ageless girl with shapeless hair and two eyes with their lights turned down, my mouth flattened into one pissed off line.

For six weeks after the break up, I would spend hours shivering in my mouldy single bed, repeatedly shuffling tarot cards until only the good ones showed up and compulsively scrolling through Instagram.

When I saw that she’d found a new girlfriend already – a person with colourful tattoos and self-affirming slogan pin badges – I spat all my super noodles into the bin and messaged her, my hands shaking, my throat full of mucus. Never speak to me again, never look at me again, I am dead to you. And it was only after sending that message, and seeing the two little ticks turn electric blue, that I began to feel Jupiter.

* The first thing my grandma asked when she found out I’d been born was “when?”

And by “when”, what she actually meant was “what was the exact time so that I can scrutinise it in relation to the planets?” Which is why, if you open the dusty pink phonebook that still sits on her windowsill 24 years later, you will find the numbers “6:36” hurriedly scrawled in pencil on the first page, like a tiny squished ant.

I was born on the 22nd October 1992, at 6.36am, in the UK – which isn’t significant for any reason other than it makes me a Libra. Three of my best friends are Libras too. And as Jupiter settled into our sign, and the seasons changed, our lives began to collectively spin on their axis. I moved to the other side of the city. I hacked off all my hair. I took photographs of myself from every single angle; finally bold enough to meet my own gaze. I rediscovered all my favourite drugs, books and outfits. I stopped recoiling from strangers. My anxiety slowly began to peel away, like the skin of overripe fruit. I was no longer afraid to be tender, with my friends, with my family, with anybody.

All those years of having sex with the same person had taught me how to speak with it, so I did a lot of that too, shocked by the sweetness of other people’s hair, of how they made scrambled eggs, of their accents and stories about how their parents got together, of the crimson blotches on my neck after they’d bitten it, of my cheek pressed with the pink imprint of unfamiliar pillows and the fag-ash scent of duvets I’d been stewing in. If I could describe the sensation of Jupiter being in your sign, it’s as if all the cravings that have been lying dormant are suddenly rippling to the surface. It is blissful mania.

It is desire personified.

Jupiter leaves my sign next month and I will also be turning 25. When the moment arrives, perhaps this intangible feeling will leave me for good, perhaps I will no longer wish to suck the sky out with my mouth. But also, maybe the work of the big orange planet has been done already. I have learned to smother people in softness, to be vulnerable and embrace my freedom more often than not, even when it makes people uncomfortable or ends in disaster or humiliation.

My ex and I are on good terms now, and we’ll sometimes make jokes about how bleak things became; about that time I ripped all our photographs into little pieces and threw them from my fist like confetti just to be spiteful, or the time we drank loads of whiskey in Paris and threw barbed jibes at each other across the Notre-Dam, the deep timbre of a male choir shaking in the background. Sometimes, we’ll drink coffee together or tag each other in memes. Our friendship has evolved into something sweet and easy and based on kindness, the way all long lasting loves should be.

My Libra friends and I have yet to find a spell that will allow us to retain the lucky fortune and expansion that Jupiter has given us, but in the true nature of the giant planet itself, we will probably just make one up, and trust that it will work anyway.

Craggs

By Charlie

I’ve not had much luck with birthdays. I didn’t celebrate my two most important ones, my 18th and 21st. I also didn’t celebrate my 14th birthday because I was in a hospital bed with pneumonia, nor my 17th birthday because my boyfriend decided to split up with me a couple of nights before (more about him later), or my most recent (25th) birthday because I was having some trans-related surgery the next day (more about that later, too).

I didn’t celebrate my 18th because I was in a really bad head space and in an equally bad school. The former was triggered by the latter. I went to an all-boys school (thanks mum) which wasn’t very fun for an effeminate little boy like me. I was called a batty boy on my first day… and every single day until I left seven years later, between about five and 25 times a day by different people. The bullying was mostly verbal, but there was a constant threat of violence and it would have been more physical if I had answered back to the verbal stuff.

But the most damaging part was the psychological bullying. I was ostracised and didn’t really have any friends. There were times where I’d go the whole day at school without anyone saying a single word to me (aside from the homophobic jibes, of course). It was basically a sevenyear prison sentence, and I was counting down the days until I was free since day one. So, naturally, as my big 18th approached and I still had another five months left in that hell hole, I didn’t really see the point in celebrating my birthday. I thought it made more sense to postpone my birthday celebrations until I’d finished school and wasn’t depressed. I never did end up celebrating it, though, because to my surprise, I was still depressed – even after leaving.

I’d left that school and the bullies that occupied it behind and had gotten a place at Central Saint Martins where I was celebrated for everything I was bullied for at school. But I was still as unhappy as I was in school. In fact, I was maybe even more unhappy, and as I approached

my 21st birthday I began to feel extremely suicidal – hence why I didn’t celebrate (duh).

Around the time of my 21st birthday, my first boyfriend (the one who broke up with me just before my 17th birthday) turned up at my front door in the middle of the night, totally out of the blue. With how badly things had ended, and how badly I was feeling generally at the time, you’d think I would have told him to fuck off, but I was so taken aback that I was lost for words (plus he looked super cute). So when he asked to speak with me, I obliged – and we went and sat on a park bench and spoke about life until the sun came up. Like most cute guys he was a bit stupid, but that night he said one of the cleverest things anyone’s ever said to me, something that really resonated with me and had a profound effect on my life.

He could tell I wasn’t myself, and as we sat on that bench in the middle of the park in the middle of the night he asked me what was wrong. I said I was depressed, to which he asked “Why?” I didn’t know how to reply. I had never been asked why before. I had never even asked myself why before. It was just the way I was. This had been my life for so long that I’d become so accustomed to it and so desensitised. I didn’t question it because I thought it was normal to feel that way. I explained that I just was. “But why?” he asked again. “There’s a reason for everything, you need to figure out what’s making you depressed and change it.” He was wrong for the way he had treated me during our relationship, he was wrong for turning up at my house unannounced that night and he was sure as hell wrong for ruining my 17th birthday... but he was right about this.

After that night, I began exploring my feelings more deeply and more honestly in an attempt to understand my depression and work out why I was so profoundly unhappy.

Shortly after, I began transitioning.

Since transitioning, I’ve never been depressed again. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been sad and I’ve had bad days. Some really bad days. In fact, this has been one of the hardest years of my life what with my parents splitting up and my best friend passing away. But I’ve not been depressed since transitioning, which I think proves that I solved the problem. It also proves that my ex wasn’t as stupid as I thought he was (thanks, Daniel).

Since transitioning, I’ve also made the conscious decision to celebrate my birthday every year, which to some might not sound revolutionary, but for a girl with a track record like mine, it’s kind of a big deal, and it’s one of the happiest and healthiest decisions I’ve ever made.

So I guess the message I want you to take away from my story is that if you’re not happy, ask yourself why, and change whatever is making you unhappy... and to always celebrate your birthday.

By Lauren O’Neill

This year for my birthday I received probably the best gift I have ever been given: my two best friends lovingly crafted me a cake in the shape of a bin. It was slathered in bright pink icing and covered in jelly sweets, and it was actually kind of an eyesore. For this reason, it was, of course, completely perfect.

When it was presented to me, candles stuck in it at all angles, I cried my stupid eyes out.

I was crying for a few reasons. Firstly, because it was extremely funny – who, I must ask, would not be hysterical at the sight of a cake which somehow managed to embody their very essence? But secondly, the tears came because I was remembering the birthday I’d had the year before. * I turned 22 in a room that I have known forever. It is the room where I watched television when I got home from primary school – I would squirrel away upstairs to the second TV so I could watch Art Attack while Countdown was on downstairs – and it was later turned into my bedroom when my mom and I moved back in with my grandparents after various disasters tornadoed into our lives the way they tended to for a few years when I was a teenager.

I was at home because I had nowhere else to be. A couple of months previous had seen the initial breakdown of the most significant relationship I’ve had so far in my life, after months of emotional abuse which left me lonely and isolated. I had no proper friends because I spent all my time trying to deal with the fact that my boyfriend was wringing me dry. So, to see my own personal new year in, I made the trek back to Birmingham from London, and I greeted my new age distractedly watching Netflix in a single bed, mentally telling myself that this year things would be different, and knowing that I was wrong.

When I woke up, my family were sweet and kind, but I felt like the day was happening around me rather than to me. And then, around lunchtime, I answered the door to an enormous box which was full of manipulative ‘gifts’ from my ex – there was expensive perfume, and a terrarium for my cactus (for whom we’d dreamed up an entire personality and life story when things were good), and loads of other stuff which spoke specifically to the years we’d spent together – and honestly the postman might as well have crushed me with it, so steam-rolled was I by everything that was going in my life.

Later that night, after I’d been to a well-intentioned but not-at-all celebratory dinner with my mom, we found out that my grandad, in a nursing home with dementia and Alzheimer’s, had been taken to hospital seriously ill. He was the only man who had never let me down in my life, and he died just over a week later.

* This year when March rolled around, I was determined to throw myself a most excellent birthday. It has always been in my nature – basically I just really love presents – to enjoy my birthday, and that’s just another reason why the year before had felt so plainly sad. I’ve never understood people who don’t like birthdays: getting older is no fun, granted, but I also just see birthdays as days where you can do literally whatever you want, and whether that’s wanking for the duration of a working day and eating three pizzas or going to a prosecco brunch with fifteen of your closest and most Instagrammable friends, I feel like it’s indulgence of these kinds of whims – within the necessary constraint of budget, but never of taste – that is exactly what any self-respecting birthday should cater to.

By the time 23 loomed on my horizon, I was no longer in contact with the man who had wrought war on my life, and hadn’t been for about nine months. And though I still struggled daily with what he’d done and the sprawl of mental illness it had brought on, I had friends who made me rosier and more myself on a daily basis than he had ever done, a job I loved, and a new flat. Bizarrely, I was happy.

I went about making things happen for myself, and planned two separate birthday parties, where I’d be surrounded by the friends I felt as lucky as a lottery-winner to finally have.

And on the day, I ate a cupcake for breakfast, savouring the thick icing and thinking about how good it felt to be here, alive, 23, eating cake for my first meal of the day. Later, I had a scorpion tattooed on my leg, because they’re small and tough, like me. I got a fresh set of acrylic nails, and then I bought pizza for my friends and we watched clips from Cry Baby and drank horrible wine. It was then that I received the bin cake, in all its disgusting glory, and yeah, maybe it was the wine, but a year’s worth of sadness and achievement and everything else felt like it was pouring out of me, and it was a turning point.

When, the year before, I’d sat alone watching but not-really-watching Hell’s Kitchen (very good go-to depression binge-watch, by the way, if anyone’s in the market) I was, in that moment, a year later, amongst people – amongst women – who cared for and understood me enough to create something cute and weird and thoughtful just for me. Maybe I didn’t quite know it consciously at the time, pizza-drunk and overwhelmed, but I think right then I realised that my life really was getting better. It had finally clicked: with the right kind of love, from others, from yourself, you can build your life from the ground up; and sometimes, yeah, that love comes in the shape of new nails, cheap wine, and a bright pink bin cake.

By Sirin Kale Despite not being the Queen or a queen, just an upwardly mobile Turkish girl from a border village in northern Cyprus, my mother has two birthdays: the one listed on her passport, and her real date of birth.

To understand why, you need to go back in time to Cyprus in the early 1970s.

Cyprus is a country torn in two liked a ripped piece of still-warm pide. In the north: Turkish Cyprus, recognised by no national government apart from Turkey—obviously. In the south, a land of package resorts, relative wealth, and inferior food, Greek Cyprus. But it wasn’t always like this.

My mum grew up in a tiny village straddling what’s now the Greek-Turkish border. The house was one storey, with two small bedrooms connected by a living room with a large table where my grandmother would stuff dolmades until they burst their seams like a teenager in a too-tight school uniform. My mum would cycle to school past Uncle Yusef, who slept outdoors in a cast-iron bed (he said it was because of the heat, though later on I wondered if it was because my Aunt Meryl’s dyed red hair was capped by a bald-patch like a freshly-shelled egg.)

Listening to her stories now, it sounds like an idyllic life, but that’s dumb—rural near-poverty is never fun!

Then, in 1974, the Turkish army invaded Northern Cyprus to restore order and stability—they claim—following a military coup in the south. Life in my mother’s village became dangerous for anyone, let alone a teen girl. What to do when you’re living in a warzone and want to escape but don’t have any money or wealthy connections? Forgery, obviously!

Enter, my granddad. To be fair, it’s much easier to forge documents when your relative works at a passport office, and even easier when you’re working in a passport office in the midst of a civil war.

My granddad did what my grandma told him—which he’s being doing throughout their 64 years of marriage, and which so far seems to be working well for them— and faked her date-of-birth on her passport application. Mum was no longer 11, but 13: old enough to go to the co-educational British-boarding school across the border, in the safe zone, on a scholarship. It was the beginning of a new life for her: one that would see her come to the UK and eventually led to me.

But in a time of over-filled inflatable dinghies bobbing in the sea like so many rubber ducks and desperate, red-eyed boys clinging to the underside of speeding trains, it’s hard not to see my mother as one of the lucky ones. Her new life was sealed with a rubber stamp: not choked out in a yellow, sinking boat.

Years later, my mum met my dad and they banged and then she got pregnant and then they got married because that’s what you did back then, even if you’d only actually banged that one time, even if you hardly knew each other, even if he was engaged to someone else, even even even. The dress was rank, obviously, because it was the 80s and also she was preggo, and then they had twenty unhappy years together before they got divorced!

I haven’t always got on with my mum, on account of a fairly severe mental illness on her part and a chronic lack of patience on mine. But I rate it and her and what she did —lying through her fucking teeth to secure a new life away from bombs and poverty and outdoor toilets—because, it’s hard to reinvent yourself fully, and it’s even harder when people want to keep you down, in your place.

It’s not like she’s the first woman to lie about her age, anyway.

I guess you could say my entire life really: my existence, and hers, was built on a colossal act of birthday fraud. And that’s ok. Happy birthday Mum — whichever day you choose to celebrate it.

mop qm p

By Georgia Murray

Birthdays are overrated. Don’t get me wrong, celebrating the day of birth of a loved one is a joyous occasion. Casting over the memories of your friendship, writing out your reasons for adoring them in a card emblazoned with stupidlooking kittens: this gives me fuzzy, warm feelings. Watching them open a carefully-chosen present – a book you know they won’t be able to put down, a record you know they’ll listen to on repeat – is sweet and satisfying. Singing “happy birthday” in chorus, and taking photos of them blowing out their candles, all red-faced and glowing, is one of the nicest ways to bask in your buddy’s existence.

But your own birthday? Well. Like New Year’s Eve, the pressure mounts. Can anyone come? Does anyone want to come? Anxiety takes shape in the form of Facebook events and texts from people saying they can’t make it. You understand, you say. Everyone’s super busy, and only getting busier as we get older. It’s ok. Also, do you think the pub I chose has the right vibe, or should I just stick with Spoons again? Everyone can afford it then, you can’t argue with £3.50 pints and cheesy chips.

You change outfits four times and put on a little too much makeup to feel comfortable, in an effort to rise to the sense of occasion. Your housemate takes a photo of you for Instagram, but when you look at it, you think, I look weird, is that what I look like? You’re there on time, with a handful of dear friends who buy you drinks and tell you it’ll be a great evening. A mixed bunch has turned up first, a work colleague, a uni friend, and an old housemate. You’re the connecting factor, and you really should fill in the conversation’s gaps, but all you can manage is repeatedly asking, Is everyone having fun?

You rigorously check your phone, We’re on our way! Leaving in 5! The first half-hour is always the worst, wondering if people took up better Friday night offers, this disquiet preventing you from enjoying the company of those solid souls who showed up on time. Two glasses of Prosecco down, you lock yourself in the toilet for ten minutes, the heat of the room and the expectant energy too much for you to handle.

When you return, more people are around the table and they hand you presents: beautiful, thoughtful gifts that love and time and effort have gone into.

And yet, when you open them – all eyes on you – your face crumples into performance, and your voice adopts a cracked, high-pitched sound you don’t recognise as your own. I LOVE IT! Thank you sooo much! I really do love it.

The night’s now in full swing, and a bottle of Prosecco down, you realise you haven’t checked your phone for hours, too busy enjoying the hum and fizz of your people chatting away, bellies full of laughter, tables sticky from spilled drinks. You look over from the bar and hear the familiar squawks and squeals of the people you love and who love you. Maybe birthdays aren’t so overrated after all.

We throw ourselves birthday parties because our parents aren’t there to do it for us any more. We throw them in the small hope that someone will shower us in the attention and adoration that our family used to, when really we know it’s unrealistic to expect anyone to be as invested in our own day as we are. After all, it’s just another good excuse to get all the friends who see you regularly to the same pub on the same evening. It’s anxiety-inducing and stressful – but anyway, you’ll be there for my next one, right?

The timer went. Tucking a dark strand of hair behind one ear, Esme opened the oven. She nudged the door carefully, as though lifting the cover of an unpredictable book. A blast of steam warmed her eyebrows as she reached into the warmth. The cake.

Her fifth attempt. The previous four had gone quite, quite wrong.

In the first she’d realised, much too late, that she’d done the thing that she thought only happened in comic books, and put in salt rather than sugar. Another was too heavy, collapsing the minute it was exposed to cool air. Disaster followed disaster.

Each new attempt meant a sniffing back of frustrated tears and a return to her scales and mixing bowl to measure out soft flour and sugar. Eggs, baking powder, butter, and then lemon rind for one, chocolate for another, ground almonds for a third, dates for the fourth. Each different, as though another recipe would safeguard against further failure. Each sagging under the glare of her expectation. They sat on the kitchen table, the last two with icing weeping over their sides.

How on earth was she meant to produce a birthday cake good enough for Sarah when everything was against her? It wasn’t much to ask – to make a brilliant birthday cake for her girlfriend on a day that smelled of grass after rain. She’d gotten up at 8am to begin, full of the best intentions: the morning light a renewal after a night full of storms. Yet here she was, lunchtime skipped by hours ago in a grumble of a stomach, still baking. This final cake would – couldn’t fail to be, had to be – perfect, given how bloody awful all the others were.

This would be the ultimate reward: something good enough to win a prize and a title. ‘Cake Maker Extraordinaire’ perhaps, or ‘Supreme Pudding Maestro’. It would grace the front of one of those fancy luxury magazines she’d occasionally stare at when shopping. Maybe it would be good enough to launch an Instagram account that immediately ricocheted her to success, leading onto a cookbook in turn (she’d need to spend more time on hair products and begin doing yoga too though, so perhaps not). She’d be a guest judge on TV shows, wrinkling her nose at anything but the most breathtaking of creations. The kind of cake to become legend: provoking hushed whispers from those who’d been lucky enough to sample a morsel.

By Rosalind Jana

Her thoughts sifted further. As she gingerly pulled the cake out of the oven, sunlight streaming in from the window behind her and turning the dust mites gold, Esme imagined a crown resting on her brow, made with sponge fingers and glued together with creamy ganache. It would be studded with ripe raspberries – the pink set off by lines of jam with pips like sequins. She would wear it with a cape stitched from a patchwork of pancakes, fastened at the neck with crystallised fruit and glazed in a layer of glittering sugar. For such a regal outfit there would be a throne: built with fruitcakes piled one on top of the other. The arms, composed of buns, and the legs, stacked out of brownies, would still be warm from the oven. A cushion

of green marzipan, molded with tassels and trim, sounded perfect to settle on as she sampled cherry gateaux and coffee puffs. There’d be a matching one for Sarah, of course. They’d sit there, surveying their kingdom as servants bought them trays piled high with the very best delicacies.

Such a sweet vision was selfish. She couldn’t allow the two of them to be the only ones to enjoy this whisked fantasy. She would bake enough for a magnificent palace of cake. Open to visitors! She and Sarah would walk through the grand gingerbread entrance, its arches curled and twisted with fondant roses, and welcome in others too. They could spring across the Battenberg flooring and take selfies by the iced liqueur fountain in the atrium. Columns of banana bread and red velvet sponge curtains and marble cake walls — now there was a vision. But why limit oneself to a single building? An entire court – full of feuding dukes and duchesses – might feast on jam tarts while the knights jousted over mouth-watering slices of Croquet Embouche. The rivalry would not be centred on who was flavour of the month with the monarch – but on who might be allowed to sample the rich-tasting millefeuilles provided by two dozen cooks hand-picked from across the country. Esme could already see the tiaras wrought from meringues, and ruffs – freshly made each morning from the most delicate choux pastry.

The cake was looking good, and she let it rest for a moment on the side, still daydreaming. No object was too large or unwieldy to be conquered by a wooden spoon and a saucepan. Cities sprung up from arid plains – mixed into existence with panettone bridges and shortbread pavements. Even deserted sheds and huts, beautiful in their decay, and constructed from apple crumble, had a place among the Eccles-baked villages. Butterfly cakes fluttered over Pavlova mountains. Caramel lakes glimmered with metallic sprinkles.

These cakes were worthy of queens, of legends, of goddesses! Artemis would hunt by the light of a cheesecake moon while her attendants bathed in cream and spices. Phaeton would bring the sun’s marmalade light with him as he rode in a Buccellato chariot with biscuit wheels. And when he had completed his journey, Odysseus would set forth on his ship striped with planks of simnel and coffee cake. Islands, home to one eyed Cyclops and enchanted women, would ensnare the adventurer and spit him out again as he sped through baked alaska waves. Penelope, with her burial shroud woven from spun sugar, would dissolve her work each night, and begin again. Perseus would find his way back to safety with the aid of an ever-unspooling strawberry lace. Icarus’ feather icing wings would melt and run across his shoulders when he soared too near to the oven-hot sky, and Persephone’s downfall could be blamed on a French fancy scattered with pomegranate seeds. Even the Gorgon – that most monstrous of creatures – was destined to make cakes stale with her craggy stare.

Well, one day Esme might find herself whipping up delights for the goddesses, and she would be the unprecedented Queen of Cakes: a wife by her side, and an apron always hanging over the back of her throne. But for now, looking down at the perfectly formed sponge, it was enough just to ice this – maybe scattering some rose petals on top. Then she’d take a knife, cut thick wedges, and serve the slices with strawberries. Sarah would be home soon. Esme would make her sit out in the garden with a glass of wine and an eager appetite. She’d take the cake out to the table surrounded by hollyhocks that curved their heads with a pleasant kind of melancholy. The place where they’d sat a few nights ago, pointing out the bats flitting in the eaves of the house. There they would sit and treasure every mouthful, leaving only crumbs as twilight soaked the sky.

e you hav t thing ut you s r i f e itho day, th ppens w are a birth this ha acle”, so you lebrate y e l c e o t t a r n t i le, u n i t a “m t r w o u a f f u o n s If y life i ith how born. U w t e u s ng b B m i r . s h e n c i t nd wat to do o happe ul. To come to ff, recomme or it t u f f I t e , s t g s a n i d r i n e g k as be th a ur lif should and ear mparison to cent yo told you co magnifi ries on space t n e i y , y s n s i e terms ling t pointle assic s e come to l e c f u o e ’s y k n i p a l l g e a g h S n o i l t h Car not verse dy.

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What one day of the year do you have to remember that you simultaneously hate being the centre of attention, while also desperately wanting to be seen/ loved/ celebrated by other people? Your birthday, of course! Just try to accept that you may never find the balance between being at peace with your ever-increasing age, and wanting to deny it is even happening.

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Forget your recurring dream about no one remembering your birthday. That would never happen nowadays, thanks to Facebook! However:

without you’ve gone om midnight le that op fr s pe te of nu er how many mi t the numb t un un co compare co t n’ t en n’ Do th Do dia. Don’t ay message. me hd rt al bi ci ke very y so a happ ay” on you don’t li appy birthd to someone people t e go th u ce yo wish you “h s ti wall post r. Don’t no of la pu er po mb d, nu re ul or you the is mo thought wo re out who ” but you ay ay” in the hd hd much to figu rt rt bi bi y “happy t “happy sa ea t gr n’ a do age you. u o ss yo wh n doesn’t me or had give en your ex wh ed wanted to, nt oi be disapp past. Don’t If you are a Taurus like me and take im mense pleasure in objects, any wrapped material present brings a spark of joy within When you unwrap itself. it, you may realis e it’s not actua to become a lifelo lly going ng treasured posses sion like you wi present was. It pr sh every obably also hasn’t been painstakingly and personalised handmade just for you, bu t try and remai anyway. Why not n grateful take the most pl easure in the un itself, rather th wrapping an focusing on th e value of the gi ultimately be dis ft that will appointing as you try to plug the ex and constantly qu istential estioning hole in your soul with mor stuff? A birthday e and more gift is a loud SH UT THE FUCK UP to And yes, even the the void. pious book counts as a material goo capitalism - especi d that feeds ally if you don’t ever read it.

midng of the day (at nning and endi ink gi th be d e an th , ay ce hd ti rt You may no ely on your bi ns te our in -h ry 24 ve at t) place within th night on the do e best ation can take Th br le t. ce uc tr ly ns on e co that th me is a l that, because ti d to fit in al period. But fuck a whole weeken ke ta u yo en celebrate t wh no e y ar wh s , ay at hd wh birt u know ate wanted to do. Yo E YEAR. Celebr the things you brate the WHOL le for Ce 4 H. d NT an MO 3 your birthday (see points no. you are ALIVE y da g in ck fu every more info).

Choose girl s and cake over boys. Yo it’s YOUR bi u may assume rthday, the that becaus guy you’re sl to YOUR hous e eeping with e after you’ will come ov ve been out, as many peop er had a swell le you can time and kiss get a-hold to get an Ub ed of. But then er to his to he tells yo “do a line of sun comes up u ”. Choose to coke and fu ck till the stay in the icing-dick-t kitchen tuck opped birthd in g ay into your house you sh cake with a are with six knife and fo lady friend rk in the will probab s - you won’t ly not fuck regret it an him again. Yo sex (a thing d u may THINK that is defi that birthd nitely not want, but re ay a real thin ally, you wa g) is what yo nt cake (an u actual real thing).

Remember that even though birthdays are the day of YOUR birth, they aren’t always fully abou t you. You may want to take this day to be selfish as you wish you could be every other day of the year, but you also have to remember all your loved ones who want to see that you are happy. If you’re upset, they’re probably going to be upset as well, which leads to more pressure and more denia l because birthdays are just naturally a bit melancholy and a minefield okay?

I don’t know whether you are full y understanding that yet.

There’s also the sense th at if you pu disco on th e night of sh everyone your birth, into a ‘70s themselves. everyone ha So two of yo s to be enjo ur best frie and don’t li ying nds are indi ke dancing fferent to di and sit on their drinks sco a sofa by th ? Well shit, e bar cradli this night ou idea, as you ng t was obviou are responsi sly the wors ble for ever well as your t yone else’s own. happiness, as

ways next d it, there’s al ch as you drea mu e any hope As id c. as t ni se pa y Don’t ar, you’ll finall ye xt d accept ne e an e yb at ma year. And n fully celebr day when you ca g. in th or desire for a ole st cancel the wh yourself and ju

By Naomi Morris

By Sophie Slater

Leo Season. 6th August. 1998.

It is my seventh birthday. I’m on a DFDs Seaways ferry from Gothenburg in Sweden, back to North Shields, a small ex-industrial fishing town on the Tyneside coast near where we live.

The ferry is 22 hours but the memories have served me for 20 years. The journey felt like it lasted that long. The waves churn and chop making my belly rise and abruptly fall with every bob of the boat. Our room is a small metal cabin with two bunk beds with seat belts attached to them to strap us each in. There is a curtain with a portcullis window behind it. The window is fake.

Aside from the sweat gathering on my forehead from the constant seasickness, I’m also sweaty with fear.

I empty my stomach on my new lightup trainers.

This birthday started the long tradition of birthday crying, which only broke on my 24th – two years back. My Dad is also a Leo, and in a characteristic manner got into the habit of booking long, indulgent holidays with his friends for two weeks to coincide with his special day. My birthday falls 12 days after my Dad’s, and for a few years, it was always the day he’d forgotten and booked to travel back.

I like the name of the ‘MS Princess of Scandinavia’ ship a lot. I’m very Aryan-looking with Jewish heritage, but the irony of this hasn’t dawned on me, aged seven. As such, I’m delighted to be taken for Swedish when old ladies stop to talk to me in the street. Until I speak back in a flat Yorkshire tone, that is, at which point I run away, terrified to have disappointed them.

The film Titanic came out in December 1997 and on official VHS video release in September 1998.

Between those dates, a pirate copy was released and circulated in the pubs of North Tyneside, where it slowly worked its way into my friend Bethany Ruddick’s living room for a sleepover screening. I took two things from the 12-rated blockbuster: a group romantic obsession with young Leonardo DiCaprio, and a deep phobia of boats. The local vicar’s daughter got so excited at the sex scene that she started humping the sofa. It’s hard to tell which neurosis I recovered from quicker.

I have nightmares for months about waking up to

waves destroying everything, having to swim for miles in the North Sea, water filling my lungs and my favourite party dresses being ruined in the swell.

I lie awake all night on the ship sweating and thrashing, scared to wake anyone. My dad works long hours and I’m not allowed in their bed when I have nightmares. The claustrophobia of the boat is no exception. I imagine we’re in the hold and the rest of the ships has been evacuated. There is no Leo DiCaprio to save me.

I can’t tell what time it is. The ship churns through the North Sea. There are pots of thick, proteiny yoghurt alongside fish for breakfast. I prod at the smorgasbord – pink curled salmon and ornamental, zigzag cut tomatoes like the ones that rest on hot metal lids until they go soggy in the school canteen.

In Sweden I discovered Pippy Longstockings, MTV and the Jerry Springer show, which my mother allows me to watch because my obsessions are highly entertaining to her. The friends we’re staying with have more than four television stations and all the American shows. Facilitated by music channels, my obsession with the Spice Girls deepens.

I have a gut fascination with Melanie Chisholm. I am a skinny, Northern child with bad teeth. I identify with her immediately. I want to be her. Mum sat me down and delivered the news that Geri had left with the same delicacy as the news of Diana’s death. I screamed and cried in her arms for about an hour. I wasn’t bothered about Diana – only that my favourite cartoons weren’t showing.

I open my presents. They comprise of one lime green crop top, one pair of striped knock-off track suit bottoms, a Mel C doll, and a VHS tape of Spice World in a special-edition Mel C collector’s tin. For a few short hours, my life is complete.

From the bitter children’s entertainers, to Patty and Selma-eqsue tourists, and bespeckled mole men parading the top deck, it was as though Matt Groening had created the universe within the boat. Amongst the finest of these creations was Julien the Clown.

We bump into Julien when running around playing on the intricate shag pile stairwells, smoking heavy tar cigarettes in the corner of the lift, turning his back as to not engage with the children off duty. I remember plumes of thick smoke emanating from him down the corridor. My sister volunteered in one of his tricks, getting the full blast of his coffee-and-superkings geography teacher breath. His show was abrupt and charmless. We children sat on an ever-convulsing meeting room floor, wide-eyed and cross-legged, looking up at Julien as he wrangled squeaky balloons into failed, contorted, sad animals that mostly resembled worms. His assistant sits on a table and it breaks. He calls her a fat cow. My mum looks very upset.

I’m hungry and tired and sick and crying. We go to the ship dining room.

Finally, after a long, delayed wait, tea arrives. It’s my favourite - spaghetti bolognese - with the “g” prominently pronounced by my mother and I. The seasickness tablets I took as an appetiser ages ago to coincide perfectly with my bedtime finally take hold. I fall asleep face first into the warm bowl. The clumpy, meaty sauce forms a pillow around my young head. The strands tangle in with my own spaghetti coloured hair. I am seven. I am finally at peace. I dream of being saved by a selfless Leo.

By Marianne Eloise If you asked anyone that knows me even a little, they’d tell you I fucking love my birthday. And it’s true. I do, to a point: I love being everyone’s singular focus and I love gifts and glitter and any excuse to party. Or I at least try to love it, in a desperate attempt to prove that I’m strong and that it doesn’t matter to me if I don’t have a family in the traditional sense. And I know that it is fine and that I have my grandad and such beautiful friends and their adoring parents, but it doesn’t mean that on a subconscious level it hurts any less. While your birthday is the perfect opportunity for people to show just how much they care about you, it’s also the perfect way to reveal the worst things about everyone else: their fundamental selfishness, their absence, their laziness. Everyone’s presence is heightened on your birthday. It’s the best time to see who loves you – and to see who isn’t there as the years pass.

And it’d be easy to make this about my dad – who of course was never there, and who, of course, still doesn’t call on my birthday. But he at least had the good manners to never show up at all to even give me the chance to love him.

My mother was always there, but physically; it’s the most present she’d be for years. She tried every birthday to “make it special”, but by the afternoon, the cracks showed and the vitriol began to bleed through. So I tried to construct the perfect day by myself; I left home and I got drunk and I surrounded myself with friends. I, defiantly, refused to let my birthday be ruined.

But your birthday, your special day, doesn’t exist in its own vacuum of happiness and attention. The real world doesn’t just stop. The night before my 17th birthday, my mother put herself in hospital after a bad breakup. I still threw a party, which seemed insensitive at the time, but I couldn’t bring myself to be alone or to tell my friends why I was cancelling it. The crisis worker saw the banners and asked: whose birthday is it? “Mine,” I said, and she just looked at me so pitifully. When my mother came home from the hospital, her friend, who has known me since I was born, still asked: “Whose birthday is it?” and I whispered: “Mine.” I didn’t tell any of my friends that my mum had nearly died. I drank quickly and quietly and watched them have fun and I laughed and I longed to never have to rely on anyone again.

Any good psychologist or person with two eyes can point to the link between that, every other trauma, and my resolute defiance to enjoy my birthday at

any cost. The childish way I cling to the day and try to make every single one better, making sure it’s worth it to scrub out the memories of all the ones I had before. The way I leave the city because I don’t want to give anyone the chance of letting me down. I’ve never wanted to be the victim, to say, “Please love me, because I find my birthday really fucking difficult, actually.” Because what is it that I don’t find difficult, secretly? Graduations, Christmas. It’s all hard!

For everyone else I remember, send the message, write the card, buy a drink. Try my best to make people feel okay, because it’s shit, isn’t it? When your special day doesn’t feel special, when your real life bleeds into it.

Every birthday I want to expect nothing, but my heart tells me there’ll be something – that it’s the perfect chance for my family to think of me even briefly. They never do, obviously, because if someone is selfish and distant March through January, there’s no reason for them to care come February. Maybe I’ll grow to understand that, but for now I’ll cope with it the same poor way I cope with everything.

By saying, “I love my fucking birthday!” wearing a literal crown and drinking a litre of amaretto and some shots and maybe beer or something else if it’s going, right, who cares?

We’re all dying! Trauma? Please, that’s not me! I am strong, I am independent, I am alone. Pour me another one! Just please, please don’t make me call her. And I’ll tell everyone that’s it’s my day and demand their attention and dedication, and I’ll sing a song I loved when I was 14 as if it makes it any better. That it’s my friends who care that I’m a year older, not my family, and it doesn’t hurt until I let it hurt. Just like everything else.

My best birthdays were those that were bittersweet, enjoyable only in the instances of emptiness and absence. Because if you stay at a friend’s or drive 150 miles from home, well, nobody can disappoint you! You made the choice to wake up at the seaside, to see a band, to drink in the street, to laugh out loud. It’s you who pulled away, who doesn’t want them back. I know that I am so lucky to have the people that I do, and for most of the year, I’m happy with how I turned out.

But every birthday just reminds me of each one that’s left to have. More than enough have passed, I guess, but still each one is closer to old age, to losing everything I love about being alive. But for now, I have friends. Fuck, I love birthdays! An excuse to party! To wear a crown, to sing out loud, to be kissed and to be adored.

Until tomorrow, when I’m not special, and my family still don’t love me.

But to cope, I’ll say: I fucking love birthdays, bring on next year!

I love today, I love myself, I love my life! I am so fucking alone!

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I’ve hated my birthday since I turned 18. Born on the 28th August, I was always the youngest in my school year which posed a few problems socially. It meant I was the last to be able to get my ears pierced, stay up late – and, well, not a lot else, because my parents were extremely lenient. I remember having a huge row with my mum because I wanted to go see Taking Back Sunday at Brixton Academy with my friends when I had just turned 13, and got so angry at her refusal that I ran away (up the road, for a maximum of 15 minutes, before I came back and she let me go anyway). This was until I turned 17 and got a fake ID. I was able to do everything that my 18-year-old peers could do, whilst being underage. I remember the feeling of absolute euphoria when I first got into a nightclub using it. Nothing is more fun than doing something you aren’t supposed to, right?

However, it was all to end the summer of 2009, just before I went off to university. I was at Reading Festival, my then-spiritual home, and was chuffed because I’d manage to sneak in a bottle of Prosecco that my mum had given me to celebrate the big day. However, I couldn’t help but feel I didn’t actually want to BE an 18-year-old. What was the point? I could still do, and had done everything that I wanted to. What would be the fun of getting drunk, or buying cigarettes, now that it was legal?

Being 18 meant being an adult, which meant having responsibilities, and starting to figure out what my purpose in life was. Which is hilarious, because I’m now on the cusp of turning 26 and still don’t feel that any of those phrases apply to me. So I woke up on my 18th birthday, got blind drunk, and cried. Profusely.

I don’t feel I’m being dramatic when I say that I haven’t enjoyed a birthday since. I spend the weeks before each one in a state of constant self-reflection. What am I doing with my life? What have I achieved? Am I too old to ever really be famous? When will I stop dressing like a teenage skater boy? I tear myself apart until I’m convinced that I am a complete failure compared to everyone else in the world ever. I would say it’s human nature to attribute certain goals to certain ages, but I don’t think that’s a general rule of thumb. In some cultures, keeping track of the years you’ve spent on this planet just isn’t a thing. And good for them.

Western society teaches us that there are clear goals to have achieved by the time you reach a particular age.

But who decided that? And what does it even mean if you do reach them? You’re exempt from judgement, and that’s pretty much it.

The thing that I’ve never understand less and less the formula of going to school, married, owning a property,

understood, and that I older I get, is that the getting a job, getting retiring at some point

(which isn’t something my generation can look forward to) and then dying is boring as fuck. Safety is a state of mind, and it seems we all just do the same thing to avoid wondering what our purpose of existing is. If nothing is certain – which it isn’t – why don’t we all just live on the edge a bit more?

I recently went to a wedding and sat next to a heavily pregnant 24-yearold, who asked me when I was going to have kids with my boyfriend. I almost spat my drink out on the table. My stock response to this question is “I don’t want kids”, which is then always met with, “Ooooooooooo, you’ll change your mind! There’s still time!” And then, because I’ve always been taught to be polite, I awkwardly laugh and leave it at that. What I’d really like to say is, “Why the fuck would I want to bring another human life into this world?

Have you taken a look around recently, babe? Cos it’s really not that great.

Trump, Putin, Brexit, climate change, the meat and dairy industry, constant social injustice and inequality, social media influencers, The Daily Mail Online, Crocs, DJ Khaled, Boohoo Man… should I go on?”

I’m not being critical of other people’s life choices – you do you, and I’ll do me. Everyone has the right to be happy. I just feel that I want to leave this world a better place than it was when I came into it. And for me, that doesn’t involve any of the things which I listed earlier. Nobody will remember you for any of those things. You can’t write those things in your memoirs. Because as embarrassing as it is to say this out loud (or on paper), I want my life to mean something to people outside of my immediate family and friends. I don’t know at what age I will feel satisfied that it does, but judging by the past few years, it probably never will. I don’t believe that there’s an age where you feel that you’ve learned everything or stop growing as a person, mentally. Life is a constant progression and you’re never too old to change your ways if you’re open to possibilities outside of your comfort zone.

So as I look at being on the wrong side of my twenties from next week, I may not be where I imagined myself to be at this age, but that doesn’t mean I won’t get there someday. I have many more years ahead of me to endure questions about my marriage/ property/ childbearing status, and that’s okay. In the words of my favourite Rihanna meme, I got shit to do, honey. Worrying about my age won’t make me any younger. Things will happen when they’re meant to, and everything is a learning curve. I may never like my birthday, but never settling for less is one of the few qualities that over time I’ve grown to love about myself. I’m not about to start compromising that now.

By Beccy Hill

For my 21st birthday, back in 2010, my sister and brother bought me some art. It’s a black framed photographic piece by Anne Collier, entitled My Goals for Six Months. I don’t know too much about Anne, other than that she works with “appropriated images” that often contain or allude to women.

I’d never had “art” before. The image in the black frame is of a spread from a diary – one of those sort of old fashioned journals where you fill in a questionnaire about your life and pets and home. It read:

My Goals for Six Months: 1. Career or job position 2. Salary or earnings 3. Personal relationships 4. Family relationships 5. Health and weight 6. Education, specific skills and knowledge 7. Free time or play 8. Travel 9. Financial assets or material possessions 10. Home or apartment 11. Transportation 12. Spirituality Back then when they gave it to me I was living in a shared student house in Kingston. The house was a rickety semi, with ragged brown carpet leading up a tiny creaking stairway that snaked up three floors. The small bunker of a kitchen was decked out in pine, giving it a sort of depressing nautical vibe. There was one mouldy toilet. We’d all smoke inside: while we cooked, while we cleaned, when we all traipsed back for a cheap soup lunch, when we got home and started drinking. It was always a little bit foggy. My family and I collectively decided that it would not be appropriate to keep the Anne Collier’s My Goals for Six Months in

By Liv Siddall

this house. It would have looked ridiculous anyway, to have real art up in my bedroom which was filled with junk from car boot sales and sunlight penetrating clouds of cigarette smoke. I didn’t mind, I said they could hang on to the art until I found somewhere else more appropriate to live. My sister took it back to her place. I left that house when I was offered work in London. With nowhere to stay, my best friends offered me a single bed in their living room in Manor House in north London. I became Liv Who Lives in the Living Room, and would fall asleep at night to the sights and sounds of a handful of people playing Call of Duty or watching films. It wasn’t really appropriate to bring the Anne Collier piece there either, so it remained at my sister’s place in safety. The next house was in Streatham – a cavernous, echoing seven-bedroomed, laminate-floored mansion up the hill by the Odeon.

My room was nicer there; we didn’t smoke inside and I began being aware of how to decorate a place. I’d toss a throw over my bed when I made it each morning, looking back on how nice and tidy it was with a smile as I exited for work. I’d look at cool blogs and take inspiration from other people’s bedrooms. I started dating a guy who was really into how things looked. So it was better, but still not quite the right place for the Anne Collier.

My next home around a year later was a beautiful crumbling old house with a stoop on a tree-lined street in Brixton. My bedroom had chronic, creeping, stinking damp, so I certainly wasn’t bringing the art there. It was during my time in that house when I was invited to go and live with a boyfriend. He lived in a converted pub in Peckham owned by his parents and shared with his sister, and they kept an incredibly tidy and beautiful home. I said goodbye to the Brixton gang and took my things over to his place in a van. My clothes were put in drawers, my records and books added to his collection, and a few bits of my junk were placed thoughtfully out on display if they were nice enough. The rest of my stuff went in the cellar. I remember thinking how his bedroom had somehow remained exactly the same as before I had moved in, with not much trace of me, but that maybe this is just what it’s like to move in with someone. Soon after that, we were having dinner with my family and they suggested maybe it was time I took the Anne Collier back and re-homed it in the clean, lovely Peckham flat. We brought it over and hung it in the bedroom. My boyfriend was very pleased about that. It looked fantastic in

his room, with his beautiful lamp and lovely plants and his tidy desk. I remember feeling a protective, Gollum-like ownership over it, this bold, black frame hanging on the white wall above his crisp sheets.

A year later I was moving again. The boyfriend and I had broken up and a friend had conveniently just given up an enormous, wood-floored room overlooking Peckham Rye Common. Sobbing, I wrapped up all my stuff in bubble wrap – including the Anne Collier – and hopped in an Uber over to the new place. When I got there I sort of broke down. The lights didn’t work, the blinds didn’t shut, I was scared of my new housemate, it was kind of dirty. Nothing was mine. I cried as I put my sheets on my new bed – why is putting sheets on a new bed so emotional? – and didn’t even unpack. I escaped to the pub, then returned and passed out in the creaking IKEA bed. The next day waking up was pretty harrowing. The four-year relationship break up had culminated in me being totally alone in a new place, vulnerable and pathetic. I looked at my dirty shoes. My cardboard boxes with my annoying handwriting on them announcing what frustratingly mundane things were inside. I had smoked indoors the night before so there was a mustiness to the room. I looked at the cobwebs, the cracked paint. The anonymous grey smudges on the white walls. I got up and walked barefoot across the huge expanse of wooden floor in my new bedroom to my little pile of possessions. The sunlight poured in and I glanced out of the huge windows, my face lazily screwed up with hangover. Outside the Rye glittered emerald green – so big that I couldn’t even see the end of it. Dotted over it were ancient trees and happy, hat-wearing dog walkers. Is this the view I was I looked at the wall in front of me and saw a sturdy nail protruding from it. I gave it a wiggle and it didn’t budge. I walked over to a stack of wrapped items and picked out the black-framed Anne Collier, unwrapped it, and hung it proudly on my wall and read it. I’d read it before. But this time I properly read it. It went in. The words affected me. The image and I had a moment. The art began to work. I was finally ready for it.

Since I let the art in to my life, I now read it a lot and think about what it says, what it politely invites me to think about from the wall. It’s going to be in every bedroom I ever live in now. It’s what will make the room mine.

By Sarah Waldron So, what happened was: I woke up and I didn’t know where I was. But I was in a bed and by myself, so that was OK. There was something in my hand. A passport. My passport. Interesting.

The first thing I remember thinking, and even now I’m impressed because I was still fairly drunk, was, “Huh. There’s a nice circularity to all this.” I had turned 30 the day before and the last time I got so polluted was almost a decade ago.

The first rule of your thirties is this: you grow up, but some things don’t change.

A few days before, a friend from back home in Ireland, Tracy, texted me. “Durty thirties! Life gets better but boyz stop looking at you :/ ying and yang :}” The year before, she said that 29 was going to be the most tumultuous year, where you get your life in order, where you dump the boyfriend whose concern for dairy products was more involved than his love for you, where you consolidate your career through Power Gal networking and start buying spider plants because cats are too much hassle.

Tracy also said that it was my Saturn Return year, where the stars align and everything goes hardcore bananas. That’s comforting. I would like to blame the universe for 29 being the year of the Depression, the Breakdown, the Loving Relationship Disintegration, the Moving Back Home and the Complete Career Pivot.

But it happened, and now I am 30, and everything is fine. Even good, sometimes.

It was so not terrible, in fact, that my thirtieth birthday deserved a party. Well.

Drinks after work, anyway. I wore a silver-knit minidress with flared sleeves and matching boots. Over it, a camouflage shirt/jacket thing and, because it was cold, a grey houndstooth overcoat with one of my nan’s amber insect brooches pinned to the lapel. Oh, and tights. The tights are important.

I woke up minus tights, coat and glasses – and my house keys. It was midday and I had to both check in for and catch a flight in a little over two hours.

There was still the matter of WHERE THE FUCK AM I? to address. My phone was smashed, a feathery spiderweb of cracks and shards obliterating the screen. I tried tentatively to turn it on, but my thumbs wouldn’t do what I wanted them to.

Neither would my legs.

I slid down the stair on my arse like a toddler. Into the living room. Sahra was

asleep on the couch wrapped in some guy. Good Sahra. The actual yin to my yang.

The Number 1 to my A+. She’d brought me and this guy home; what a woman. He shifted slightly, and that when I realised that she was snoozing atop my cousin, Sean. He had apparently turned up at some point.

When I finally located my head and replaced it back on my body, Sean was checking into my flight on Sahra’s work iPad and I was emptying my tote looking for my last shred of sobriety. Instead, an avalanche of yellow plastic butterflies spilled out. Sean and Sahra filled in the blanks.

1. I arrive at the Coach and Horses in Soho for some cheap and nasty drinks, find a table outside and await my guests.

2. I have invited too many guests.

3. All of them have bought me gin.

4. I AM THE BEST! I LOVE BEING 30.

5. Let’s go to a sex club!

6. I am somehow at a bar almost exclusively populated by women in bodycon and men whose wives don’t understand them. And the cast members of Made in Chelsea.

7. Ooh, a fishbowl.

8. Ooh, another fishbowl. Mmm, tart.

9. Not my fishbowls.

10. For the third time, I am telling a man in the smoking area that if his wife doesn’t understand them, why can’t they get a divorce?

11. Momentarily distracted by a magician. I hate him.

12. What is this? Is it gin?

13. *some scenes missing* 14. Two hours later, I am on a bus, dozing and aggressively wedging my feet into the (occupied) seat opposite me. Sahra says the man whose crotch I was accidentally foot fondling was ‘very nice about it’.

15. Something happens at McDonalds but neither Sahra or Sean will tell me. I have a perfectly round bruise the size of a 5p piece on my wrist.

16. I fish my work appraisal notes out of my bag, meticulously fold them in half and place them carefully on a dresser, then slide gracefully into a sleep during which I did not belch or fart, not even once.

17. Still don’t know where the butterflies came from.

This is a win for me. 10 years ago, when this kind of alcohol consumption last happened, I rolled up at 4am to my parents’ house, with vomit on my mother’s nice Jil Sander coat, and started screaming on the lawn. I was punched out. It was… not great. My nan had had a massive stroke the night before. Her brooch was on the houndstooth coat I lost, or possibly threw in the Thames.

I reflected on this when I finally got to Stansted Airport, in a silver go-go dress, with no tights, no luggage, no deodorant and deeply impaired eyesight.

Right, yes. I am still a mess in many regards. Messiness does not go away. It gets diverted with responsibilities and accumulated knowledge and self-respect, but messiness still exists. Your twenties are when you learn (slowly, painfully) how to incorporate mess into your life without completely fucking it up. Your thirties are for coming to peace with the amount of mess, knowing how to handle it, how to say no to it, and acknowledging your capacity for your own bullshit as well as everyone else’s. One night of acting the fool and a subsequent gargantuan hangover would not end me now as it did back then.

I bought a cinnamon bun the size of my head and ate it on the flight, looking forward to seeing my parents in the arrival hall. It really did have a nice circularity to it.

By Gina Tonic

What they don’t tell you about trying to kill yourself is what comes after: you assume you’ll feel glad you didn’t manage it. Everyone assumes you’re happy you didn’t do it. You wish you could care about being alive, rather than being bitter that you’re still alive.

Aged 12, I foretold a prophecy for myself. Deeply emo, devastatingly emotional and beginning to embrace my wish to die, I promised myself - “I won’t make it to 24.” It was double my age. It was over a decade away. It didn’t feel like a real date that I could ever reach.

I told everybody. I wondered if anyone was going to hold me to my word.

References to death never felt real before. It wasn’t as much a desire as an inevitability. An assured end that I was destined to take. One that was assigned to me before I could even breathe. Because it runs in my family, because I hate myself, because I’m unlovable, unambitious and unworthy of being wanted.

It is the 21st September. It is my 24th birthday. It’s 12 years after my suicide wish. It’s 6 months after my suicide attempt. It’s going to be 3 weeks full of festivities to celebrate that I made it. * You don’t know how many friends you have until you try to kill yourself.

You can try and picture your funeral, the dress they’ll put you in, the amount of people that’ll turn up. Would my mam actually play Welcome to the Black Parade? What kind of spread will they put on for the wake?

Fantasising about your funeral party never factors in their actual faces. The tears. The snot. The dry skin because moisturising isn’t on the agenda right now. The exhaustion. The frustration. The laughter. The mouthing along to hymns nobody wants to sing.

You don’t know how many presents you’ll get when you try to kill yourself.

Magic Stars, because I’m a star. Sunflowers, because I’m sunny. Daffodils, because I’m Welsh. A full food shop from my parents who want to protect me. A takeaway from my flatmate who knows I won’t be able to cook right now. * Back to birthdays: back to being born. I was born on the cusp of being a Libra, a star sign I’ve always called myself anyway. I was born in a red Ford Escort parked outside the hospital, with no doctors, no witnesses, only my mam herself. If this was being studied in a high school, I’m sure that would make a great metaphor to analyse. I was born on the same day as Stephen King and his prom queen character Carrie, another point to pick apart there, if you had the time, energy, creativity, or desire.

Everyone wants to pretend their life is a movie - looking out car windows listening to Bright Eyes, a colourful cutaway montage of making it through

puberty, to come out the other side an assertive and assured Young Adult.

Births and birthdays are often integral to the plot of our favourite indie films (shown at Cannes, directed by a Coppola, seventy percent on Rotten Tomatoes.) Characters hate their birthdays, refuse to mention it, get caught out, get thrown a surprise party, get to secretly celebrate it. Characters love their birthdays, won’t shut up about it, plan a million things for it, get let down, get upset, get thrown a surprise party, get to celebrate it. There’s no birthdays that trudge along, no birthdays you have to work on and do something on the weekend instead, no birthdays that are low key, little events with close friends. No birthdays that don’t mean anything.

I definitely fall in the second category. I won’t shut up about it. I haven’t shut up about it. I’ve been planning for months: choosing pictures for the Facebook event and exhausting all clothing sites’ search bars for ‘Sequins Size 16.’

This year isn’t a landmark for anyone. Still nearer 20 than 30, no mugs or champagne flutes or giant keys read 24. Barely any cards. It’s meant to be kind of a nothing year, where nothing really happens, where nothing really matters, where you transition from young adult to actual grown up. The kind you were in awe of when you were six.

The one you couldn’t imagine being when you were twelve.

Maybe this year I’ll start paying off my student overdraft. Maybe I’ll actually reach my reading goal on Goodreads. I could even potentially get a promotion, if I pitch myself well enough. I guess the excitement in this birthday isn’t about growing older, or closer to any kind of goal. The excitement isn’t for the kind of parties that I throw every year. It isn’t about falling in love or moving away; finishing something important or starting anything exciting.

It is a sense of accomplishment.

This birthday will be the same as all my other birthdays.

I’ll look ridiculous. I’ll get silly presents and heart filled cards. I’ll get a lemon drizzle cake. I’ll probably fall over, throw up and fucking love it. I’ll be ALIVE: I’ll be screaming my way through this birthday and the next and the next and the next. I’ll be screaming until the depression comes to get me again, which it will, and I’ll sing ‘Penblwydd Hapus i ti’ because my suicide wish turns 12 on the 21st night of September.

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In a period of 23 years that saw all kinds of instability and lack of consistency – changes in houses, cities, countries, schools, friends, father figures and not-father figures – the only thing that remained a constant force in my life was my mother. By the time I was ten years old, I’d already moved four different times, to four different schools in four different continents, and was used to an ongoing, rotating cycle of making friends and then losing them mere months after. By my preteen years, I’d been on the observing end of the dissolution of a marriage and was about to witness another divorce – but those years of rocky volatility was the fact that each and every year, come my birthday October, my mother would be determined to make it the most memorable and special day for the both of us.

Just in the way that my mother was the sole constant and stable figure in my life, so were the thoughtful and amazing birthdays we would spend together.

My mother is my best friend, and there’s something about a connection with one other person sharing in huge life changes that make for a stronger connection between the two, so we’ve always been really close and have similar tastes in humour and pop-culture.

Birthdays were always just special – we’d always be determined to spend them together, with my mom even rescheduling work trips should they fall on October 18. She’d go ham on organising them, even though I’d always been content with just a home-made Betty Crocker cake. Until I was about nine years old there were parties that were spy-themed, ones that had an alien motif, and the most memorable one being when she got me to perform “Sk8er Boi” in my debut as a Legit Rock Star (thanks mom). As I grew older and themed parties became lame, birthdays became a quiet, personal time for the two of us. Big blowouts were exchanged for home-cooked meals and movie marathons, never mattering how my

birthdays were spent, just so long as we were together. Looking back on it now, mother’s determination to make my birthdays memorable could, perhaps, be construed as her making the most of the one thing she felt she had control over – feeling as if all other parts of her life were out of her hands. But by having one day a year where she was in total control, I felt that even to her, birthdays were cathartic. For us, birthdays, however way they were spent, were the one special day that we could control anything and everything, the one thing we were able to take upon ourselves to make sure was perfect – when nothing else in our lives was.

It wasn’t until I left for college that I spent my first birthday apart from my mother, and it was first birthday I’d spent completely alone. I’d had a difficult first semester at university. As a shy, quiet introvert struggling to befriend other shy, quiet introverts at my small liberal arts school, the first few months of freshman year were hard and, for the most part, spent in solitude. As someone who hated attention, I naturally kept the fact that my birthday was looming a secret to my hallmates and my close acquaintances.

This, of course, backfired – the friends I did make had already scheduled outof-state trips during my birthday weekend and my roommate left me a happy birthday note on a post-it, returning to her home in Baltimore before I’d even woken up. I of course acted like it was no big deal that my friends weren’t there to spend my birthday with me – even though it was. But I felt like it was unbelievably selfish of me to be upset. How could I demand for them to change their plans just because it was my birthday?I still couldn’t help feeling alone. I decided to make the most of my birthday, and to not let other people get in the way of what was supposed to be a day that was special – I took myself out to my favourite bookstore, treated myself to some new reads, and had some really great dessert. It was a quiet birthday, but it was a day – and still is the day – that was the loneliest I’d ever been. Spending my birthday without my mother was not the same.

Thankfully, I’ve had much better birthdays after that. In the five years since, I’ve had much happier memories of birthdays, but they always have been events that I’ve felt forced to arrange due to this societal pressure that revolves around birthdays. How are you planning for your birthday, who are you planning for it with, and how are you going to make it the most special birthday you’ve ever had?

With my mother, birthdays never felt forced, and with my mother, birthday celebrations became a bond that connected us even closer. In years that were rife with instability, a birthday was the one thing we were certain was coming, certain to arrive every year without fail, no matter what country we resided in. I haven’t spent a birthday with my mother since I was 18, since my loneliest of birthdays, but maybe that speaks volumes. I’d never realised how much I needed my mother – the only constant force in my life – until I had to spend my birthday apart from her. Now that I can’t spend birthdays with my mother anymore – a sure sign of “growing up” – my birthdays since have been spent feeling a little bit lost. I think they always will. At a time of a renowned feeling of instability as I enter adulthood, I’ve been made to lose the security blanket that came in the form of birthdays sure to be spent with mom; but maybe that’s how it always should be. Maybe it’s time I let go.

By Princess Julia My mind was somewhere else, and then a dear friend died suddenly. It makes you think, doesn’t it? You have to stop what you’re doing and take stock. Put things into perspective. I always think ageing is somewhat of a luxury item. Any age in the future seems like a faraway notion and then without warning you reach it. When I was 18 I thought 25 was quite a statement – a quarter of a century, to be exact. When I reached that age I still felt young. I was young, I’d built up an idea that at such a grand age I should be doing proper things. Things the society we live in said I should be doing.

Obviously, I had failed abysmally. I was still busy finding stuff out, I hadn’t focused on one particular career and I certainly hadn’t found my vocation or calling. And so I just carried on. Nothing had changed and I let go of society’s ideas of what I should be doing and did the complete opposite. I continued to work in clubs – I was a coat check girl at Taboo.

I got dressed up, piled on the makeup and went out a fair amount. I did a lot of different things. It was the mid-’80s. I didn’t think I should be settling down. In fact, in a sense, I felt quite settled. I didn’t think I should be chasing some dream; I felt I was already living the dream.

Obviously there were things I felt unhappy about, some things I could change. Others I had no control over, or simply lost interest in.

Then I reached those landmark chapters of age, 30, 35, 40 and I still hadn’t changed my outlook. I concentrated on DJing and travelled near and far in the rave era of the ’90s. I didn’t think I was missing out on a thing. In fact, I was living life with a sense of adventure. The idea of intimate relationships and childbearing eclipsed me and was for me never a priority in the first place.I felt it was society that placed these supposed ideals upon us, ideas that you should find your “soul mate” by a certain age, or have children by a certain age. If you didn’t, you failed. Now, listen – I’m the biggest romance addict going. I’m all for true love and if you find it, I’m the first in line celebrating the fact. Children – I love them, but for certain reasons, never had much of an impulse to breed. If you don’t find these things or simply aren’t interested, don’t consider yourself a let-down. You aren’t letting anyone down… especially yourself. Funnily enough, I did get married – twice,

to be exact. I married my gay friends in the days before gay marriage was legal. I felt I was a conduit so they could stay together. Recently, my aged mother decided to tell me how disappointed she was that I’d never had children – bit late in the day, I thought. My mother is a traditional type of person who does things the way society has lain out for her. Is she happy? Does she feel fulfilled? Perhaps she does, perhaps she doesn’t. In my own experience, relationships can be the loneliest of places. They’re fine when they are going well but not so fine when they go tits up and you discover you’ve made a bad choice. Things change, people change. We learn, we grow, we find what feels right. If things don’t feel right step away.

When it comes to my own birthday, it’s something of a love-hate affair.

As the years go by I dread it. Actually, it’s not that that I dread being another year older, it’s that I’m in complete denial over the physicality of the ageing process. Or perhaps I’m only too aware. I like to maintain myself up to a point! Birthdays come and go. I’ve only ever celebrated the seminal dates; the others are birthdays of no account. I sort of count myself lucky to be still dancing the disco round. In my gothic mind I dream of doom and gloom, something about shifting this mortal coil, ending it all under the weight of the most glittery of glitter balls. Cut short while youth is still on my side, preserved forever in the year of my demise.

There’s something to be said for that. There’s also something to be said for reaching some grand old age and being able to regale the tale also.

Don’t you sometimes imagine your own funeral? How you’ll be remembered, what music will be played. I want everyone to really cry at mine, in fact I’m considering professional mourners. A fanfare of overwhelming grief would seem appropriate followed by a celebration of a life well lived.

Perhaps it’s because a friend has recently died that I’m pondering mortality, the human condition, reflecting on the world we live in and how best to live with in it. Every year that passes brings a new revelation of sorts. It may be something you’ve seen or heard before but presented in a different way that makes it enlightening. It may be an experience unique to you, knowledge that can be imparted for the greater good. Or it could be that although our world brings its fair share of sadness it also brings a sense of joy and wonderment in the things we do and how we inspire each other.

CONTRIBUTORS ROSALIND JANA NAOMI MORRIS Rosalind Jana is an author, journalist and poet. Her first book Notes On Being Teenage was published last year, while her first poetry collection Branch and Vein is available through the New River Press.

Naomi Morris is studying for a masters degree in Creative Writing in Edinburgh. She has an insatiable thirst for True Crime and Drag Queens, but also tries to write poetry as professionally as possible.

www.rosalindjana.com

LAUREN O’NEILL SOPHIE SLATER Lauren O’neill is a writer originally from Birmingham, now based in London.

She currently works as Noisey’s news writer alongside practising art, writing poetry and making zines.

Sophie Slater is Co-founder of Birdsong and a Northern lefty business punk.

She chats about socialism, feminism & fashion mainly, and has written for The Guardian & Refinery29.

http://birdsong.london www.twitter.com/hiyalauren

PRINCESS JULIA

MARIANNE ELOISE

DJ, writer and anything else that comes her way, Princess Julia is a person who likes a challenge. Her interests span a myriad of disciplines.

Marianne is a writer for Dazed, VICE, Little White Lies, Noisey and others.

She’s also a full-time emo and runs Emo Diary, a zine and Twitter of diary extracts and emo throwbacks.

www.instagram.com/hrhprincessjulia

www.twitter.com/marianne_eloise

SIRIN KALE

BECCY HILL

Sirin is a staff writer at VICE’s feminist women’s site, Broadly, and freelances for a range of other publications. She’s interested in culture, music, arts, politics, and women’s rights.

Beccy Hill is the founding editor-inchief of Sister magazine. She started the magazine at university in 2012, and believes that women’s issues are everyone’s issues

www.twitter.com/thedalstonyears

www.sistermagazine.co.uk

LIV SIDDALL

DAISY JONES

Liv Siddall is a London-based writer and podcaster who has just finished a two-year-stint as founding editor of Rough Trade Magazine and host of Rough Trade Radio. Prior to that she was Features Editor of It’s Nice That and has writes for a bunch of independent print titles and online mags. She is also a contributing editor of Riposte.

Daisy writes about queer culture, pop music, astrology and being a freak on the internet. She’s also Managing Editor at VICE’s music channel, Noisey, and freelances for a bunch of others

SARAH WALDRON Sarah Waldon is the founder of The Coven, deputy editor of annual publication Fanpages and a recent contributor to the Irish Times and Broadly.

CADY SIREGAR Cady Siregar writes music stuff for Stereogum, DIY Magazine, and London In Stereo. She is Polyester’s editorial assistant.

CHARLIE CRAGGS

CELIA EDELL Celia Edell is a feminist vlogger and PhD student based in Montréal, Canada.

Her interests include philosophy, critical race theory, mental health awareness, and bad made-for-TV movies.

On the internet she goes by @ceedling.

GINA TONIC Gina is Polyester’s online editor. She has recently contributed to Dazed, Everyday Feminism, Bustle, The Debrief and Crack Magazine.

Charlie Craggs is trans activist, author, and the founder of Nail Transphobia. She topped the Observer’s New Radicals List of social innovators in Britain and was recently awarded a Marie Claire Future Shaper award.

Her book To ‘My Trans Sisters’ is out in October 2017.

GEORGIA MURRAY Georgia Murray, 25, is Fashion & Beauty Writer at Refinery29 by day, and runs Girls Club Zine by night.

She’s based in South East London and has a penchant for orange eyeshadow, Buffy marathons and patent coats.

www.instagram.com/princessgeorgina

COPYRIGHT & DISCLAIMER: All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in part or whole without written permission from the publishers. ©2017 Polyester Zine limited. The views expressed in Polyester are those of the respective contributors and Editor in Chief, and are not neccessarily shared by the publisher, these parties cannot be responsible for them. For all enquiries contact hello@polyesterzine.com

a qla For better or for worse, we all experience birthdays. Every 365 days, come rain, shine, or disaster — each one of us turns one year older. Irregardless of if you’re the type of person who makes a Facebook event three months before their birthday and counts down the days from 364 to 0 in anticipation of being showered with gifts and attention, or the type of person who hopes the big day will pass without anyone remembering: birthdays are far from stress free for best of us.

Just because we’re told we should enjoy the occasion each year, the reality isn’t always all victoria sponges and surprise parties.

Whether you spend each year pretending to love a present from a distant relative, bickering with family across a restaurant table, downing copious amount of cut price cocktails in an attempt to forget your own mortality or obsessively checking social media to ensure everyone who should has wished you well — it’s just as easy to dread our big day as it is to appreciate it.

It’s not all doom and gloom though. Birthdays are an opportunity to turn an otherwise meaningless day in the calendar into a chance for self reflection, celebration, and most importantly: making everything about yourself. There’s no other time you can force a group of people who otherwise would never interact with each other together in the name of your happiness, or expect the most self indulgent of requests to be fulfilled without questioning.

From mothers with two official birth dates and professional funeral mourners, to how to celebrate the big day in 12 short steps and receiving a bright pink cake in the shape of a bin — we’ve invited 16 Polyester contributors to share a piece of writing touching upon what Birthdays mean to them. Across the pages of this zine you’ll find stories of baking, growing older, quarter life crisis’, as well as odes to why birthdays are overrated, our mothers, astrological musings and much more.

Edited by Ione Gamble.

Assistant to the editor: Cady Siregar. Photography by Chloe Sheppard. Cake by Hebe Konditori at Palm Vaults. Set design by Lucy Cooper.