The year I stopped waiting for someone to show up.

I didn’t always love my birthday.

Actually, for most of my life, I dreaded it.

There was always this feeling hanging over the day. This quiet anticipation that started before my birthday even arrived.

Who’s going to show up for me?

People have shown up over the years. I’ve been loved. I’ve been celebrated. I have memories of people making an effort and wanting me to feel special.

And somehow, underneath all of that, there was still this looming possibility of disappointment.

Because inevitably, someone I desperately wanted to show up wouldn’t.

Or they wouldn’t show up the way I had hoped.

And somewhere along the way, birthdays became less about celebrating another year of my life and more like an annual test of my worth.

Will someone choose me today?

Am I important enough today?

Can I please, just for one fucking day, feel like I matter enough for someone to make me a priority?

I don’t know exactly when that story started.

I just know I carried it for a very long time.

For as long as I can remember, I cried on my birthday.

Every. Fucking. Year.

I was sad. Or disappointed. Someone said something that hurt my feelings. Someone didn’t do something I hoped they would. Someone wasn’t there who I wanted to be there.

And inevitably, I would end up thinking the same thing:

I can’t even have one day.

One day where nobody hurts my feelings. One day where I don’t feel disappointed. One day where I don’t have to wonder whether I matter as much to the people I love as they matter to me.

Looking back now, I can see how much power that thought had.

Because when you walk into your birthday believing I can’t even have one day, you’re already looking for the evidence.

Every unanswered message feels bigger. Every person’s absence means more. Every imperfect moment becomes confirmation of the story you already brought with you.

Of course it felt profoundly sad.

I wasn’t just experiencing whatever happened on that particular birthday.

I was experiencing that birthday plus every birthday that had come before it.

Forty-two years of evidence, carefully collected by a brain that already knew what story it was trying to prove.

For 42 birthdays, some version of me kept walking into October 1st hoping this would finally be the year the right person did the right thing in exactly the right way and healed something they probably didn’t even know they were being asked to heal.

That’s quite a job to unknowingly assign another human being.

And it meant that no matter how many wonderful things happened, there was always room for one person’s absence to become louder than everyone else’s presence.

Last year was one of the hardest years of my life.

That’s a story for another day because, Lord, we do have some ground to cover there.

But by the time my 43rd birthday arrived, I had reached a point where I was deeply fucking tired of other people having so much authority over how I experienced my own life.

Too many things already felt like they had been decided for me.

I wasn’t giving my birthday away too.

So I reclaimed it.

I decided exactly what I wanted to do. I decided who I wanted to see. I decided how I wanted the day to feel.

And then I did those things.

Nobody rode in on a white horse carrying a cake and 42 years of emotional reparations.

I just showed up for myself.

On purpose.

And it was the first birthday I can remember fully enjoying with absolutely no tears.

That still gets me.

Because after all those years of believing I needed something outside of myself to change, the biggest thing that changed was who I had put in charge of the day.

Me.

I wasn’t sitting around waiting to see who remembered. I wasn’t watching someone’s behavior for evidence of how much I mattered. I wasn’t letting another person’s choices determine whether I got to enjoy being alive.

I chose myself before anyone else had the opportunity to choose me or disappoint me.

And apparently that changed everything.

Now here we are.

Year 44.

I would love to tell you that this profound shift happened because my life became dramatically easier over the last year.

It did not.

In fact, this year has been its own spectacular heaping dumpster fire in several fascinating new ways.

So this isn’t a story about finally getting the circumstances right.

It’s about realizing how much of my life I spent waiting for circumstances—and people—to give me permission to feel the way I wanted to feel.

My birthday just made the pattern easier to see.

For years, I was asking the same question:

Who’s going to show up for me?

I don’t ask that question the same way anymore.

Of course I care who shows up. I care deeply. I love the people in my life who choose me, celebrate me, call me, check on me, laugh with me, sit beside me in the shit, and keep coming back.

Being able to show up for yourself doesn’t make other people’s love irrelevant.

It just means their love is no longer responsible for proving your worth.

That’s different.

And it took me a hell of a lot of healing to understand the difference.

So today, I’m 44.

There are pieces of my life I understand better than I ever have and other pieces currently held together with hope, caffeine, nervous-system regulation, and what I can only assume is divine intervention.

But I like my birthday now.

I like that this day belongs to me.

I like deciding how I want to spend it.

And I really fucking like the woman who finally realized she doesn’t have to sit around hoping someone else will make her feel chosen.

So cheers to 44.

Cheers to the people who show up day in and day out and make my life infinitely better simply because they’re in it.

And most importantly—

cheers to me for finally learning how to show up for myself.

Thankfully I’m fucking here.

I sure as hell don’t want to go back.

— Jen