I Cried At My Birthday Party

Content descriptions: contains implications of abuse and discussions of suicide attempts.

I was born in Muskegon, Michigan on June 27th, 2001, in a hospital that got torn down the very next year. Sometimes I think that's a little bit ironic, how both my essence and my place of birth were demolished shortly after I entered the world. It's just a little bit too fitting, you know? But the thing about demolishing something is that it is often done to build something new in place of what once was. DID is a little different than knocking down a building---what was demolished was actually a bunch of cerebral Spaghetti-Os souping around in my brain, just waiting to form a coherent solid frozen block of mushy personality--but in most other ways it is exactly the same. It's just like if you destroyed the bricks and wood and nails you were going to use to build said building before you even started building it, just because you could, just to feel some sort of shitty power over something that was going to tower over you, had it been allowed to grow. It's just the same story on different paper, a hospital and a body and a destruction. I'm a little tired of writing about that, but I haven't gotten to the "building something new" part quite yet, so I'm still chained to that wall.

To pull back a little bit from metaphor, though: today is June 27th, 2026. It is my 25th birthday. And the harsh damn truth of reality is this: I'm not a demolished building and I'm not a tool to be used or a decoration to hang or a "tell me where" doll to position --- I'm actually the hospital itself, all of the years it spent in service, helping people and saving lives and delivering children. You'll notice I'm diving right back down into the deep end of metaphor; it's just hard to face it, and it's hard to say it out loud or write it down or stop long enough to think about it.

I'm actually not broken at all.

I have hated myself for two decades, you do the math, and in the most inexplicably intense ways possible. Yesterday I told my mother that self-love isn't even a nothingness--it's an absence of something, a hole someone punched into the wall, a dent in the side of the car, most aptly a family photograph with one member's entire body scribbled into a dark, intangible mess of Sharpie. It is noticeably gone. Sometimes my mom and I joke about how being abused means you get I HATE MYSELF; ABUSE ME HOW! tattooed on your forehead in bright firetruck Comic Sans with ink that is visible to everyone but you. It isn't very funny, but that's what makes it funny; when you can't squeeze the tragedy into something sweeter, you laugh at it instead, hoping that turning it into humor will defang it, put the monster to sleep so you can sneak on by and grab the treasure. I'm still looking for the gold.

It's really hard to confront. It's hard to look at yourself after being intimately aware of all of your flaws and kissing your capacity for harm passionately under the moonlight and all of the things you are supposed to do when you're a problematic person and go: well, maybe I'm not as bad as I thought I was. That capacity for harm is there, but instead of pointing the gun in front of me like I thought I had been doing, I was actually holding it to my own head, and not looking at myself from the proper perspective. In Russian Roulette there is a bullet, yes, but there are also five chances to live.

I try my best to be the best person I can be, and though I make mistakes, I do my best to correct them. That's more than I can say about a lot of people. But the point of this post isn't that I want to seem like a good person; the point is that I'm finally beginning to understand that I am a person... just, you know, in general.

I've tried to commit suicide ten times. My pets alerted my family five of those ten times; the other times I was either not successful or was hospitalized. I can't remember a time in my life where I envisioned myself alive at a quarter of a century, and hopefully beyond. I can't remember a time in my life before now where I would have attached that last part--"hopefully"--and meant it with true sincerity. But I think I mean it now.

Yesterday was my birthday party. All of my favorite cousins came over to spend the day with me. My mom ordered me a rainbow custom cake and planned party games and put so much effort into making it an amazing day, just because she loves me. My cousins came over because, for some reason, they love me and want me around. I got to meet my cousin's boyfriend for the first time and I didn't even have a New Stranger Panic Attack. It was an extremely fun day and it is the first good birthday I've had in eleven years and in the middle of it I broke down crying.

I don't know why. I guess it just...

It occurred to me in the middle of the party that I have the life I always wanted. I have people in my life who love and care for me. My family is wonderful (the accepting members, anyway), my friends are wonderful, my partner and pets are wonderful, and I finally feel like I have a real future. I am surrounded with more support and love than I have ever had before. I don't really get it yet, for aforementioned reasons, but there is something about me that people like and want around. And - independently of this, but it did help - I realized that they actually have a point.

A lot of people say that you can't truly be loved until you love yourself, and I've always hated that phrase, because it really does not take into account Shitty Life Circumstances. I never loved myself because I never had a myself to love. How could I have loved myself when I only saw myself as an extended amalgam of Badthing? How could I have loved myself when I felt like I was living in a cocoon of scar tissue?

The funny thing is that I developed this amazing life while I was still living in that cocoon. I pulled myself out, but it was the love and support from the people around me that cut the damn thing open so I could emerge. You know?

I am so deeply appreciative of the people I have in my life, and at times I worry expressing it too often or too intensely makes me seem clingy or annoying, but how can I not be constantly taken aback by how lucky I am to have what I do? It's like when you discover a shortcut in a really long pathway; you don't know how you ever made it home when you had to walk the long way round, because things are so much easier now.

So I'm not broken, and I'm wanted, and I'm loved. This question has been on my mind: "Now what?"

What do I do now? It's like I'm finally starting my life for the first time at 5 years from 30. I finally get to live.

I think the answer to that question might be "anything I want to do." I don't know.

I guess we'll find out.