November 20, 2014 - Written by: Poppy Gillian

It’s My Party and I’ll Cry if I Want to

Birthdays are funny things, aren’t they? We spend the first 21 years of our lives looking forward to it, and then each year after that less and less so.

On my fourteenth birthday I got a guinea pig. On my recent twenty-fourth birthday I spent the day discussing sexual health with teenagers in college (I shouted out the word ‘masturbation’ just as the IT guy walked in to fix my computer. I think he was more embarrassed about it than I was). How time flies!

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I can remember my sixteenth birthday being rubbish. I can’t remember why, but I know that there was this big build up and then something happened to upset me. In contrast, my 21st birthday was an awesome night of drinks, laughter and cheesy dance moves with my uni friends. For my birthday this year I decided to go out somewhere different.

Big mistake. It was clubs full of men who thought it was okay to grab my arse (the customary greeting is ‘hello’, and would have got you a lot further FYI.) No matter how many shots I had it was still shit.

Half-way through the night I was trying to get away from a sleeze-ball, who would not leave me alone no matter how much I ignored him/threw dirty looks in his direction. I made my way towards my sister and told her that I was trying to avoid him. She thought this was hilarious and shoved me in to him. We then had a bit of a scrap and she ran off crying saying that it was all my fault. This then made me cry because my night was ruined.

It’s exactly the sort of teenager-y drama that I absolutely hate and I’m so embarrassed that it happened. The only consolation was that my waterproof eyeliner worked. It worked so well, in fact, that I had to spend the next twenty-four hours trying to get it off.

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I spent the rest of the weekend feeling sorry for myself. My birthday night out had been rubbish and now I had a whole year until my next one. But after having some time to mope about it, I’ve decided that birthdays are overrated.

Why do we pin so much on one day of the year? It’s like New Years’ Eve: why do we wait for midnight on one day of the year to signal a fresh start?

We should be trying to have ‘good days’ every day, and if we want something to change then we should try to make it happen. I’m going to try to appreciated the good times a bit more and stress about the bad times a little less. I’m not going to let one bad day influence my whole year.

If you liked this article, why not check out ‘Happy Fucking Birthday‘?