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My birthday is Jan 14, and I always felt like I got a little shafted in the birthday department, but whether that is because of the timing, or the cheapness of my grandmother, I do not know. But in LA you can always have an outdoor birthday, so most of my parties were in the park.
I'm trying to have a regular relationship with my birthday as an adult, but there are still a lot of weird feelings I have about it. I was always made to feel that my birthday was really difficult and annoying for everyone involved, and as a teenager, I didn't want to inconvenience anybody by making them go out of their way for me, but I deeply wanted someone to honor my birthday, so I would end up not telling anybody it was my birthday and then being sad the whole day about how nobody got me anything or even wished me happy birthday.
Eventually, I tried to arrange some badly put together, last minute parties that no one could attend, usually because it was so last minute, or so close to Christmas, and I would be even more heartbroken because instead of my friends not knowing, they knew and didn't have the time or interest in my birthday.
Now I put more planning in birthdays, and I have more realistic expectations of birthday celebrations, and I'm more interested in celebrating myself first, instead of being celebrated by others. I had to get over the fact that my birthdays in childhood were just a microcosm of my life at that time, which is that no one wanted to deal with me, and I was overwhelmingly seen as a burden. As an adult, birthdays would bring back that feeling, but I couldn't get swallowed by it, I had to make my own birthday memories, even if it was painful to even acknowledge that it was my birthday.
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