It is 11pm on a Saturday night and I am several glasses of wine in. I am sitting on a long wooden table in a tiny Athenian shop, where our host Anton is filling our glasses with delicious Greek varieties. I listen to the hum of my new friends switching between languages as they chat to each other, from English to Turkish to Greek. We are at the stage of tipsy that allows my friend Ezgi to confidently claim she can taste undertones of cheese in her glass of red.
I feel a warm glow of contentment that I’ve experienced before only when two conditions are satisfied: the first, I’ve had three small glasses of wine, no more and no less. The second, I’m hosting a social event that is en route to qualifying as a success. As I survey my friends and sip a white that Anton described as “buttery”, the world feels golden and harmonious, as it does only when you are crossing the hinterland between merry and drunk.
Cut to an hour and a half earlier, and I was in a state of blind panic. Nothing makes me more needy, anxious and desperate than my birthday. This time last year I wrote my column about how turning 28 made me feel like I was running out of time. At 29 I am similarly vexed by the whole affair. Birthdays appear to me to be strategically designed to cause maximum distress: why is one expected to celebrate getting a year closer to one’s certain death?
And worse than that, I loathe the way they function as a kind of annual exam on how well-liked you are and how many people want you in their lives—measured by the crude metric of who is willing and available to trek from one side of a city to the other to have a drink with you. This thinking might be the legacy of my having been the most unpopular child at my school, but I can’t help but wonder if many people find their special day to be a bit of an ordeal.
At 9.30pm in Anton’s wine shop, things had not been looking good. My wonderful Russian friend and I were the only ones to arrive on time and the two of us sat at a table laid for eight for an agonising 45 minutes before the southern Europeans finally began to filter in. (What else had I been expecting, really?) Soon, we had so many people that we had to cram them in—terrified of last-minute dropouts or no shows I had over-invited for the space. But what did that matter? I was so relieved that people had turned up that I wasn’t going to stress about running out of room.
Of course, treating your birthday like an exam is a deeply stupid recipe for misery. I have grown wiser about my birthday over the years and now realise that numbers at a party reflect how organised you are, not how loved. They are a test only of whether you gave invitees enough warning, and reminders, of the event.
Historically, I have scoffed at the behaviour of “birthday divas”, who unapologetically schedule weeks of events to celebrate themselves. I now realise that my attitude was rooted in envy. Those of us who take pride in making “no big deal” of our birthdays are trying to make a virtue of a vice. There is absolutely nothing to be gained by listening to the inner critic that tells us we are not worth cherishing as we are. Through managing my mental health conditions, I have learnt that that beating oneself up actually doesn’t motivate one to be better—self-compassion is a much more effective tool for change.
This year I’ve decided to embrace my inner birthday diva, and though I have cringed the whole way through a week of drinks and dinners and cakes, I have been rewarded with the discovery of some bloody good wines.
