Today is a joyous day – I should probably stipulate that I wrote this post on January 12, so we are speaking in past tense, because the 12 of January just happens to be the day my big sister, Danielle, was born.
Danielle has never been overly keen on making a big fuss about her birthday. She is an introvert and prefers to spend the day with her family, which we all enjoy, but sometimes, I feel as though Danielle, and many others, should perhaps take their birthdays a little more seriously and not be so quick to dismiss them, as so many of us typically do. I, too, am someone who prefers not to have a grand affair over my birthday, and while I am sounding a bit hypocritical at the moment, I ask you to hear me out.
Please don’t confuse what I am saying with the ludicrous ideology that some people boast that entails having an entire birthday month. That shit is pretentious as fuck, and I find it astoundingly arrogant that some people truly believe they deserve an entire month of celebrations.
I’m sorry, but you’re not that special.
Celebrating a birthday on the actual day, however, is absolutely something I can get behind, and while a lot of us don’t enjoy birthdays because they signify aging, aging in itself is a beautiful thing, and furthermore, it is something we shouldn’t take for granted.
We got one day out of 365 to make a point of celebrating and appreciating the fact that we gained another notch on the post, and I think that is what birthdays should represent – accomplishment, gratitude and growth. Not aging with a negative connotation attached to it, but instead recognizing where we are at in life and taking one single day to acknowledge it.
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
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