Have birthdays always been melancholy, or is this another modern problem?
I researched the HISTORICAL ROOT of feeling weird on your birthday.
It’s my birthday, I’m sitting on my balcony, and a parakeet is screaming her fucking head off. Luckily, her head IS still attached, but her scream-song feels extra urgent today, like a bad karaoke rendition of Alanis Morissette requested less than 24-hours after a break up. If I spoke fluent bird, I’d be a better listener. I’d lay out a charcuterie of top-shelf birdseed, and ask her if she’s in the emotional trenches after being let down by a lover. I’d ask her if she’s beefing with the Magpie on the neighboring branch, or singing her Hinge profile bio to attract a new sex partner, or if she’s just loud because the sun’s out and she CAN. She doesn’t need my condescending human permission to take up space, okay?! I know that.
I think I’m fixating on the bird’s scream-singing because she sound so articulate right now, and I feel deeply inarticulate around my birthday, like all my words are loose teeth and my gums are Big Feelings ejecting the loose words. There’s blood everywhere, and my friends are sweetly texting me, but I want to isolate myself because all verbal energy has left my body! It’s not a self-pitying isolation, more like a full-on melt into goo, I’m more of a pile of slimy texture than a person with conversational abilities. It seems the only hope of exorcising my bleeding gums is by taking to The Page to figure out why this happens every year.
The good news? I know I’m in good company when it comes to the Birthday Blues, because I read a Psychology Today article about how common it is! Pro tip for those who love to spiral efficiently: Psychology Today is basically the WebMD of your annoyingly hyper-specific emotions. While WebMD assures me every mysterious headache is a lethal brain aneurysm, Psychology Today pets my head and lets me know that feeling guilty after grocery shopping is actually NORMAL and here are 5 Steps To Help You Cope With The Abundance Of Cereals In Your Pantry That Will Go Stale.
If Psychology Today was a movie character, it would be the Yes Queen best friend who magically appears with tissues and boxed wine after the breakup. Unfortunately, just like the movie BFF, Psychology Today is comforting AND very reductive and hastily written. Ultimately, you can’t trust it TOO MUCH because it’s never going to say: GO ON A WALK AND GET OVER IT BITCH, or PLEASE GO TO A FUCKING REAL DOCTOR YOU’RE A MENTALLY DISTRESSED PERSON WITH GOOGLE, NOT A PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR.
I digress, but my point is: I’m not alone in my Birthday Blues! I bet some of you reading also have a yearly existential jaunt, because how else are you supposed to respond to the news that your rattling bones have made it another lap around the sun? It’s weird to measure how long you’ve been alive! The sunny spotlight of congratulations can also cast a back-shadow of death’s imminent approach. It’s okay to admit that! Addressing the complexity of a day as simultaneously mundane and existential as a birthday is awkward, because on one hand, let’s just shut up and eat cupcakes! But on the other hand, maybe it’s time to sit down with that TikTok journal you spent $45 on when you were jilted off Lemon Haze, and get to the bottom of your intentions for the year?
Obviously, Psychology Today is all about processing whatever is coming up, even if it’s a rattlesnake sprinting through the pipes after living in your sewage system. When giving advice on how to approach a surly loved one experiencing the Birthday Blues, Psychology Today suggests you “make your sister's favorite macaroni pie and stick it in her freezer with a note.” Maybe for some people that sounds sweet, but to me it sounds like the go-to move of a serial killer with strong Midwest cooking habits. Who wants to thaw macaroni and eat it?! What does the note say? “HERE’S SOME SOGGY MACARONI YOU OLD HAG, PLEASE STOP CRYING, IF YOU USE THE WRONG SETTING ON THE MICROWAVE ICE CRYSTALS WILL MELT AND MAKE THIS WATERY. ALSO I’M NOT YOUR SISTER, I’M A GUY WHO IS GONNA MURDER YOU.”
Despite all the callbacks, this isn’t an advertisement for Psychology Today, which is honestly good for them, because this would be a really confusing ad. My pit stop on their website was supposed to be just that: a pit stop on the way to some Deep and Radical research about the history of the Birthday Blues. Unfortunately for me, the big fish SEO overlords and my lack of JStor PDF downloads cut my research spiral shorter than planned. I was hoping to get some dense sources explaining why some of us want to climb up a tree and become one of the leaves every year, but the main hits are brief clips with therapists who shrug and say “Yeah, there’s no diagnosis. But people get sad on their birthdays! Probably because the passage of time is a non-negotiable enigma, and life is an endless chaotic sequence of painful and briefly euphoric moments experienced both through the individual and collective consciousness.”
Okay…wow…NOT what I was hoping for!
Naturally, as all who have failed the sciences do, I turned to art (this is a joke, don’t come for me, I’m anemic, I’ll faint in the ER). I figured someone smarter and even more insufferable than me, someone who owns a theremin and grows their own basil (I’m jealous and low-key in love with them), had already rounded up a comprehensive ranking of Birthday Blues art. Or maybe there was an old Rolling Stones article that traced the musical history of Sad Songs About Your Birthday. But, you guys…beyond some random playlists (that are NOT just about your birthday), TikTok hashtags, and more pop psychology articles, I didn’t find anything? Please, if you have the secret scroll containing a comprehensive collection of Birthday Blues art — share it in the comments for the collective good.
Luckily, you don’t have to strike gold on Google in order to know Lesley Gore’s version of “It’s My Party,” the catchy pinnacle anthem about a birthday gone wrong. I love Lesley Gore, not just because she was a great singer, but also she was a lesbian and very outspoken about LGBTQ rights! Like many in the lesbian tradition, she discovered she was a lesbian at Sarah Lawrence, both because Sarah Lawrence pairs you with a Uhaul and a long-term “roommate” as part of orientation. But also, because she finally could breathe away from record execs who marketed her as an All American Girl.
Despite loving Lesley and going on recent rabbitholes about her life, I’d actually never looked up the story behind “It’s My Party.” While the song was credited to John Gluck, Wally Gold and Herb Weiner. The lyrics were actually written by the freelance songwriter Seymour Gottlieb, and he hocked them off to Werner (maybe after they kissed at a bar?!). Gottlieb loosely based the lyrics on his daughter’s sixteenth birthday, and more specifically, her crying jag when she found out her grandparents were invited. To make it spicier for the radio, the official song lyrics narrate a girl crying after her boyfriend Jonny briefly disappears, only to reappear with backstabber JUDY wearing his ring! This is high drama, telenovela drama, and I appreciate the flair! But I’d also love a version where the teen is crying because her grandparents are invited. That’s funny and still relatable!
While I felt sufficiently tickled by my VH1 Behind The Scenes moment with “It’s My Party,” it still didn’t heal my void by pointing me toward a fossil full of hieroglyphics contemplating the universality of Birthday Blues.
So I kept digging. Soon, I realized I didn’t even know the origins of “Happy Birthday” - that glorious song we all whisper off-key while one brave soul hits the actual notes. As with all popular music, there’s some drama behind it. Allegedly, the song was written in 1893 by sisters Patty and Mildred J. Hill. Patty was a kindergarten principal living in Kentucky developing new teaching methods (pre-Montessori, we see you Patty), and Mildred was a composer who crushed on piano. With their powers combined, they created the song “Good Morning To All,” an easy-to-remember song with a catchy melody for kids.
Almost 20 years later, in 1912, “Happy Birthday” appeared, with the same tune and different lyrics. This is where matters got ethically and artistically sticky. “Happy Birthday” wasn’t registered with a copyright until over 20 years after it came out, in 1935, crediting authors authors Preston Ware Orem and Mrs R.R. Forman. Fast forward 50 more years, and Warner purchased the copyright for a cool $25 million, and it was estimated to be the highest-earning single song in history. Not too shabby for a song that’s hard to shake your ass to!
Of course, this leaves the question of whether this money-maker was lifted from brilliant sisters just trying to innovate education. Was “Happy Birthday” actually the “Baby Shark” of its time, that was lifted and rewritten into a Taylor Swift song? Well, there were a series of court cases over it, that eventually renamed the Hills as the authors of the song. Originally, the song was set to be copyrighted until 2030, but the specter of families getting sued for belting it at a public park ultimately pushed a court to name it public domain in 2016.
Reframing ‘Happy Birthday” as a copyrighted song barely 100-years-old really reset my long-view of birthday celebrations in general. I figured maybe there’s no litany of literature about Birthday Blues because it’s a super modern concept. Maybe, just maybe the industrial revolution is to blame for the existence of Birthday Blues?! I mean, what’s the point of being literate if you can’t overintellectualize a yearly festive dose of melancholy?!
My next deep dive was just a zoomed out overview of the modern birthday in general. I learned the first mentions of birthdays came from That Girl - Ancient Egypt around 3000 BC. The OG birthdays were coronation dates when Pharaohs were crowned as Gods, so maybe consider that next time you roast your friend Emma for throwing a “birthday weekend.” At least she’s not being crowned a GOD (but who is to say she isn’t one?)!
After catching wind of the hot Pharaoh parties, Ancient Greeks started baking moon cakes as a celebratory tribute to lunar goddess Artemis, complete with candles. This tradition has now evolved into us offering our worst coworker candlelit cakes under fluorescent lighting while everyone dissociates. The arc of history is long and powerful!
For the Roman Empire fetishists out there, most research points to Rome as the first place commoners received birthday celebrations. But that still only included men until the 12th century, meanwhile, the Christian church was all: “this is some Satanic Pagan perversion to celebrate normal people.” So as a forced silver lining, women weren’t being called Satanic for birthday parties, since they didn’t have them yet. They just got to be Satanic for making eye contact with the wrong person or learning how to read.
Fast forward a few more hundred years, and Germany created Kinderfeste - a clear precursor to children’s birthday parties, complete with candles and cake. This was allegedly where the tradition of blowing out the candles to make a wish began. Not only did this crack open the volcanic eruption of children’s birthdays, but it helped catapult birthdays at a mainstream cultural mainstay. Even after women were officially included in the “humans whose birth matters” category, birthday parties were relegated to the Bill Gates of that era until the Industrial Revolution made cake ingredients cheaper. Don’t get it twisted, the Industrial Revolution may have revolutionized agriculture and the factory system, but that was all just a means to the end: cake for everyone.
While all of this information was legitimately interesting for me to uncover, it still didn’t feed my hunger for Birthday Blues related history! Since I don’t have a chorus of more qualified writers yelling against me, I’m going to theorize Birthday Blues are a modern problem, with timeless ingredients. Being sad about getting older or closer to death isn’t new, compare-and-despair in relation to peers isn’t new, feeling a general and sudden sense of melancholy isn’t new.
BUT, the pressure to experience and perform a magical birthday is a new one. I could and will, in my most grandma way, argue that social media has made it worse. “Why grandma,” you ask, hoverboarding away from me. “Well, granddaughter,” (you’re all canonically girls), it’s because birthdays aren’t just about your personal experience and whatever you decide to plan or forgo. In the age of constant commodification, they’re ALSO about the online performance of those decisions.
But honestly, for me - the answer is pretty damn simple. It’s been a year and I’m still stuck in an immigration abyss that has stilted my creative goals and relationships. I was going to put up an hour at Fringe and had to cancel, again. The last time I canceled was 2020, lol, in a fun round of traumatic reruns, this year I was forced to cancel because of logistical issues (immigration).
I missed several holidays and milestones with friends and family in the US I thought I’d be there for, I missed out on collaboration opportunities, I haven’t been to a dentist or doctor in years, and I was gatekept by people who simultaneously look up to my peers back home. It’s painful to feel frozen in place again immediately after COVID, while attempting to rebuild a life in my 30s that I thought I was testing, not committing to. So, I look to history as a map for the non-linear abyss of the birthday reflection.
In lieu of a historical touch point to neatly tie up this curling rabbithole, my welcome mat ethos is: I’m happy to still be here with you freaks on my birthday. Especially, since it’s not even my birthday anymore. It hasn’t been my birthday for almost three hours. At least, in Amsterdam it hasn’t.