It’s been a while since I UNLEASHED. Life has been a carousel of busy, sick, busy again, and then suddenly today arrived — my birthday. Before anyone starts bouncing around with well‑meaning enthusiasm, let me be clear: birthdays have never been my thing. Not because I’m miserable about them, but because I genuinely don’t understand the concept when it comes to myself.
I know how to make birthdays special for other people. I can build a day, a moment, a memory. I can theme it, shape it, elevate it. But for me? I never had that growing up, so I never missed it. And when adulthood rolled in, and I tried to create something meaningful for myself, it felt hollow. Manufactured. Like adding another task to the list. No matter how much I spent or how clever the idea, it never felt special — it felt like work.
Then came the era when people actually wanted to make it special for me. And that’s when I realized I had absolutely no idea how to react. Compliments bounce off me. Gifts make me awkward. Attention makes me want to hide behind the nearest large object. So I did the simplest thing: I tucked the date away and moved on.
But here’s the truth beneath all that bravado. I genuinely appreciate every single person who takes a moment out of their day to send a greeting. I may not know how to receive it gracefully, but I feel it. Deep inside, beneath the persona, I’m still private and shy. The persona — the one people see, the one that fills rooms and carries the weight — that’s something I built. A shield forged from a lifetime of disappointments, rejections, and standards I was told to meet but never quite reached in my own mind. It’s armor, not arrogance.
But even with all that armor, there’s still a part of me — the part I pretend doesn’t exist — that watches the names on the Friends’ List every year. AngryWolf looks at the ones who don’t say a thing, don’t send a message, don’t even drop a lazy emoji, and he feels the list should be culled. Trimmed. Pruned like a tree that’s grown wild. It’s petty, it’s ridiculous, and it’s absolutely beneath the persona I built… but it’s there. And maybe that’s the most embarrassing part of all this: the quiet truth that even someone who doesn’t understand birthdays still notices who remembers, and who doesn’t.
So today, instead of cake or candles or forced celebration, here’s something better: perspective.
A fun fact to lighten the mood on a day I don’t quite “get.” 1900 is the point I now stand halfway from.
Let that settle. Sixty‑three years before I arrived, Queen Victoria was still on the throne. The British Empire was still a thing. People traveled by horse, steam, or sheer stubbornness. And sixty‑three years after? We’re livestreaming from glasses, arguing with AI, and carrying supercomputers in our pockets. I am standing at the midpoint of a 126‑year arc stretching from Victorian Britain to the digital age.
And if you want to know what 1900 looked like, it wasn’t quiet. Britain was deep in the Second Boer War, fighting in South Africa. America was a young 124‑year‑old nation with a population of about 76 million. Animals we’ve since lost — the passenger pigeon, the thylacine, the Caribbean monk seal — were still alive. Queen Victoria was in her final full year. The Labour Party had just been founded. The Daily Express printed its first issue. The first council estate opened. Tonga became a British protectorate. Cars were still a novelty, and a 1,000‑mile motor trial was considered heroic. Influenza outbreaks, anarchist attacks, and tennis tournaments all shared the headlines. I don’t know why I care about tennis — I really don’t — but apparently even in 1900 it was causing a fuss.
Football, though — proper football — that’s different. Even back then, the game was already carving out the world I’d eventually grow up obsessed with. Aston Villa were champions of England. Bury lifted the FA Cup after battering Southampton 4–0 at Crystal Palace. North of the border, Rangers took the Scottish League, while celtc won the Scottish Cup. And in the annual England v Scotland match at Celtic Park, Scotland absolutely thumped England 4–1 in front of a crowd so big no one could agree on the number. Some things never change.
When I was born, Victoria had been gone for only 63 years. The Wright Brothers’ first flight was just 60 years old. America was 187 years old — it’s now 250. The world population was 1.6 billion; now it’s over 8 billion. The world I entered was closer to Victorian Britain than it is to today.
So no, I don’t “celebrate” my birthday. But I do acknowledge it. Not as a party, but as a marker. A reminder of distance traveled, battles survived, and the strange, stubborn fact that I’m still here — still learning, still uncomfortable, still trying to understand what it means when people say “Happy Birthday.”
And that, in its own quiet way, is enough.