Still Existing Is Not a Reason to Celebrate

I know many people mean well. A card here, a message there. “It’s your birthday today.”
But to me, it is not a celebration. Not a reason to hang decorations or look back with a smile.
Not because I am ungrateful for life itself. Quite the opposite.
I see exactly how precious it is, and how heavy it becomes when you have to carry it every day in a world that does not fit you.
This day makes something tangible that I would rather forget: that I exist inside a system where my existence does not truly belong anywhere.
That the things I do every single day, cooking, caring, enduring, are never celebrated, yet on this one day they are suddenly supposed to be “enough” to justify happiness.
Instead of a birthday, this has become a day of remembrance for me.
A reminder of what it once felt like to truly belong somewhere. And of everything I no longer have, but still carry with me.
This piece is about that tension. About what it means when you do not want someone to congratulate you, but simply sit beside you quietly for a moment and let you be exactly as you are. As you live. As you miss.
I no longer want birthdays. Not because I do not value life, but because I do not want to divide it into days that are supposedly more important than others. Life itself should be celebrated every day.
But what is there to celebrate in my situation? That I still exist? That I survive inside a world that has exhausted me?
That I am still cooking for all of us in this tiny room, maintaining the garden, caring for Fannar, and trying every day to move through the same walls without breaking apart?
The last time I experienced my birthday as something beautiful was with my girl Kaiya. I want to preserve that day exactly as it was. Undisturbed. Pure. A memory that does not need to be overwritten by new moments that can never mean what that last birthday meant to me. We went to our favorite park and bought nice groceries at Jumbo XL. At home there was cake.
Since her death, every birthday feels like something that pushes me further away from her. As if people are saying: look, time moves on, while all I can think is: but she doesn’t.
I do not want to fill that day with gifts, cards or well-meaning words that all slide past what I actually feel. I do not want to be remembered for being celebrated. I want to remember myself as I was then, with her.
And still the world keeps trying. Cards on the doormat. Messages on my phone. Even my mother, who links this day mostly to her own story: what it was like for her, thirty-eight years ago, to give birth to me. As if my life is not being remembered, but her memory of a role she once played.
And no matter how often I say I want to forget this day, that I want peace, that I do not want to pretend, people seem overwhelmed by it.
Maybe because my silence confronts them with something they themselves would rather not feel: that life does not feel like something worth celebrating loudly for everyone.
That surviving, in this world, for some people is an achievement that is never applauded.
That exhaustion means holding yourself together every single day while a day like this does not feel like a milestone, but like a magnifying glass over everything that is missing.
What I need is not a celebration of my “perseverance,” no symbolic little line telling me I am still here. What I need is recognition that I cannot do more than I already do. That there has to be courage in simply continuing to exist, even when nobody sees it. That some people do not want to celebrate birthdays because every day already asks more of them than they can carry.
So let me exist in my own way. Not as a celebration, but as a whisper. Not as a bright marker on the calendar, but as a quiet act of loyalty, to myself, to her, to what life truly means when you receive nothing as a gift.
Some forms of love cannot be poured into cake and decorations. Some forms of love ask for rest.
And that is all I still want.