Birthdays are supposed to be simple. A cake, a few candles, maybe balloons and a singing of “Happy Birthday.” But people who have lived through a birthday know it’s rarely just that. Birthdays can be exciting, awkward, joyful, disappointing, meaningful, or even heavy, and all of these feelings can occur at the same time. Birthdays are one of those universal experiences that look the same on the outside but feel completely different depending on the person.
For some people, birthdays are a celebration in the truest sense. They love the attention, the texts at midnight, the posts on social media and the feeling that for one day, everyone is thinking about them. These birthdays are planned weeks in advance: dinners, parties, outfits, group photos and more. There’s comfort in tradition too, the same type of cake every year, the same family dinner, the same ritual of blowing out the candles. For these people, birthdays are a reminder that they are loved and valued. ”My birthday is close to the middle of the year, around Presidents’ Day, I tend to follow the same birthday traditions every year, celebrating with my friends and family,” senior Bryson Filbert said.
For others, birthdays come with complicated emotions. Turning a year older can feel overwhelming, especially in high school, where age is often tied to expectations. Are you supposed to have your life figured out by now? Be more confident? More successful? Birthdays can highlight comparisons – who remembered, who didn’t, who posted, who forgot. Instead of excitement, people may feel pressure or disappointment, even when surrounded by others. “I have cried a lot of times on my birthday. The feeling of getting older is scary and sometimes celebrating doesn’t change that feeling. When I turned 18 and became an adult, that was the first birthday in a while I actually felt like something changed,” senior Danielle Rubin said.
There are also birthdays that don’t feel like celebrations at all. Students may associate their birthdays with loss, change or difficult memories. Others may feel invisible, especially if their birthday falls during breaks or busy seasons when everyone is distracted.
Not every birthday comes with gifts or parties, but that doesn’t make it any less important. Sometimes a birthday is simply about getting through the day and acknowledging another year of growth, even if it’s quiet. “My birthday is during the summer. I used to go to camp every year so celebrating my birthday was exciting but also a little weird because I wasn’t with family or home friends, every year it felt the same. I couldn’t get texts or be acknowledged that people knew it was my birthday; it was a little sad,” senior Mia Coven said.
What birthdays ultimately show is that there’s no “right” way to feel. It’s OK to want a big celebration and it’s OK to want nothing at all. It’s OK to feel grateful, sad, excited, nostalgic or all of these emotions at once. Maybe the most meaningful part of birthdays isn’t the cake or the gifts, but the reminder to be good to ourselves and each other. A simple “happy birthday” can mean more than we realize.
