Why I Don’t Share My Birthday

Originally published: April 12, 2023

April was by far my favorite month growing up. Selfishly? Maybe, but who doesn’t love their birth month? Mom would make her signature brownies to take to class (back before allergies restricted the love of moms on their children and classmates), I’d be planning my birthday party (maybe even having a co-ed party this year! Eeeeeek!), and looking forward to Christmas round two. April was full of joy, celebration, love, cake, laser tag, sleepovers, hugs, cards in the mail with my name on them, my first crush’s birthday, and all around smiles. It was that way for a long time. I looked forward to it every year.

Celebrating my friends on their birthdays has also always been something I’ve loved doing. I’ve never been the best gift giver, and even though I joked about it above, my birthday highlights were rarely ever the gifts recieved (not that they were bad gifts). Gift giving ranks as my last love language. Scoring a whopping zero or maybe one each time I retake the test to see how closely mine line up with whomever I am interested in at the time. My celebration of others often comes in the way of quality time and trying to make my friends feel loved and celebrated (although I am certainly not perfect at this and I do forget a birthday here and there and am not proud about it). It’s become my favorite question to ask people on their birthdays. “Do you feel loved and celebrated?" We deserve to feel both of those things as humans. Those are two things that I think the world would be better to fully embrace but I also recognize that those two words can mean very different things to very different people so let me break down what I mean when I say "loved and celebrated".

Loved. Feeling loved means having people who care for your well being, sit with you in the suck, party with you on the mountain top, and tell you how it is. They don’t gas you up just because you’re friends, they don’t always approve of your actions (because love and approval do not go hand and hand), and they challenge you to help you grow, not tear you down. Calling a friend in a time of need or even when you haven’t talked in a while, keeping up with your people, being curious and asking questions (a lot of questions!) about their past experiences, current circumstances, futures hopes and dreams, telling them you love them (not “love you”, but “I love you” because we all need to hear that), giving them a hug, saying you appreciate them, spending quality, undisturbed, time with them are all ways to show love. All of these things you can do with people you don’t see eye to eye with. I recognize saying this might bring up some emotions in you, but I want this to be super clear, especially to those of you reading this who claim Jesus and Christianity. I read once that you should “love the sinner and hate your own sin”. We aren’t called to judge. We are called to love. In very few cases are we to even bring up the actions of another to them or the church. You know the whole plank in your own eye scripture right? That applies to you. We are called to love and that means your neighbor who voted a different way than you did and has the sign in their front lawn. That means inviting people in to your home to break bread at the dinner table even though some people at your church might say they shouldn’t be there. That means not only ever spending time around people who believe the same thing as you. Jesus dined with sinners. He had them at the dinner table all the time. He showered them in love. Note that he didn’t sin with sinners, but he ate dinner with them. He spent time around them. He loved them a lot. But guess what? You are the them that he spent time with. And not to rank sin or anything, but he spent time with people who murdered others, who cheated their neighbors, who literally put him to death. To love someone and show them love means to not put a filter over the people that get your love. Otherwise no one really gets the love. And don’t be shy with it. Give it to everyone, all the time. All the love, all the time. Christian or not, our world would look so much brighter with unfiltered love from everyone.

Celebrated. Celebration! To celebrate someone means to honor them! To remind them they are unique, special, loved and needed. Our birthdays are such an amazing time to party with friends in celebration. Party however you chose. Hearing from friends, getting taken to dinner, having a cake made for you, you know the feeling! You can feel it a bit right now just reading those words! It feels so good. Notice that this doesn’t say to celebrate someone means to agree with everything they do. No, in fact, it’s the opposite. It’s putting aside those differences and acknowledging that we all could use to feel celebrated once in a while and it just so happens that we have a birthday every year. However, this should not dictate how many times you should celebrate others or be celebrated. Once a year is far to little. Celebrate the small things. There are two ways to see life. One, as though nothing is a miracle or two, as if everything is a miracle. Joy overflows from a heart ready to celebrate the everyday miracle. Party and celebrate whenever possible.

For the longest time, really up until now, I’ve not wanted to be loved and celebrated on my birthday. Even now it feels a bit weird. As a kid, I loved it. Staying up late with the guys for a sleepover, TP’ing our crushes house, playing Rock Band til 3am, Facebook posts from the random person who you met once at an event years ago, all things I loved to do and experience. In high school, April started getting a little cloudy for me. Things started happening in and around my birthday that made me shell up and made me want to avoid the Facebook posts, text messages, calls and cakes. April 17th, 2011, my grandma on my mom’s side passed away. She was my first grandparent that I remember spending a significant amount of time with. A true legend and a very loving woman. April 7th, 2012, a good friend that I looked up to passed away in a climbing accident. Another rockstar, who loved others so well and pushed me in my faith. April 17th, 2013 a friend of mine that I met and spent time with on a trip to South Africa passed away in an apparent suicide. Someone who made the shock of what we experienced in Africa palatable in a unique way. After the second year in a row in just felt like something wrong was going to happen close to my birthday and it did. It didn’t feel good. I was confronted with death in a way I had never experienced it before. It was hard. I remember vaguely going into college, gathering friends together on my birthday to be around the people I loved, which was great and healthy and should have been what I kept doing, but I started feeling some guilt for celebrating during the time that it felt like I should be honoring these people who had passed. It might sound silly but it was what I was feeling.

Since then it has been something I have forcibly kept quiet. People ask when my birthday is and I try to gauge if its a conversation where they are going to remember after the conversation what I said or not. I would try to get away just with saying “April” hoping that answer would suffice for why they were asking. It often wasn’t enough and I would timidly say that I don’t like to share it. That would typically be met with confusion or more questioning trying to get me to spill the beans. Sometimes people even reach for my wallet to check my ID. As I look back I don’t blame them at all, I really don’t. I myself often try to find out quickly when someones birthday is and try to put it somewhere that will allow me to remember it. I just bought a perpetual calendar and I am pumped about it. I am not scared to use reminders. If you can remember everyones birthday off the top of your head, you’re a genius unicorn. Good for you. I am no unicorn and need all the help I can get. Even then I forget sometimes. But in the moment, for a long time, it was a how-long-can-I-keep-this-quiet kind of topic for me. Coasting through the years, getting a call or text from a few people on my birthday, keeping it a secret from the rest of the people I met was how I operated. I am not super proud of that, but it was how I dealt with the things that happened around that month.

I used my Ironman in 2018 as a crutch to look past my birthday towards another date in April. A distraction of sorts. But since then, I have started to question why I keep the date a secret. It really started with my mom prying and asking why I didn’t share it, asking why it wasn’t on Facebook or why I wasn’t inviting people over anymore. Telling me in the most mom loving way to “Get over it. Everyone deserves to be celebrated”. And after a while I started to believe her. I started to see how if I love to celebrate others, others love to do the same and in a way I am depriving them of the chance to show love in a way that they know how. It was selfish of me to do. We also have been reading recently in book club about the importance of keeping up relationships. How loneliness is an epidemic leading to and a cause of nearly all major diseases. Having and living in healthy community can boost your health significantly. That isn’t just mental health either! Your body will operate better living in rich community close to or in the area you live. Yes, FaceTime is great, but nothing replaces submersion and quality time with people you see daily, that love you for you, who live physically close to you. Boy oh boy is that hard to build as an adult! Isn’t it just easier to have the night to yourself, lock the door, crack open a bottle of wine and enjoy some Netflix? It takes several decisions to get off work and go home to change, take a quick breath and then leave again to do something with people you just met and have no idea if you even like yet while going through the painful small talk that seems to revolve around the same few topics with nearly everyone it happens with. Saying you hate small talk is not a personality trait. It can be painful, but it is necessary in every relationship other than maybe your Uber Eats driver (speaking as one myself). Embrace it and find a way to have fun with it. How many questions can you get in to someone before they ask you something about yourself? It can be fun. Making friends as an adult can be far from fun until it happens or until you find the community that you click with. That you ~vibe~ with. Emphasis added for anyone younger than me reading this. However, it is so crucial to sit in the “unfun” for a little bit. We have gotten so soft trying to make everything in our lives comfortable and easy. Just because making friends, in a city you know little about and maybe know even fewer people isn’t the easiest thing in the world does not mean you should resort to dinner and tv by yourself every night. Be uncomfortable for a little bit. Suck it up. Or as Mama Flanegin wisely said, “Get over it”. Seriously! I don’t mean to sound harsh, or make my mom sound harsh. She is the sweetest woman out there. But your life is at stake here! Make some friends. Create community. Dive deep into getting to know who the people around you are. Do things together. Create those bonds! Send the text inviting your neighbors over. How sad is it that most people do not even know the names of the people they live right next to! Our doors should not be something that we shut to block us from the rest of the world and give ourselves privacy, but a doorway into relationship for those who live around you. You have to be the one to do this because rarely is your neighbor going to be. And if they are then lucky you, accept the invite. Show up. Don’t flake. Go to the Taco Night!

Two of my friends, Nate and Suz, started hosting a Taco Night every Thursday night because someone did that for them before they moved cities. It happens every Thursday night. Look on their calendar and you will see it every Thursday. They make time for it. It is consistent, it is easy, they don’t ask you to bring anything (although it would be kind if you did). They tell you to bring whoever you want and they mean it. All they want is for you to be at their table. And their table might be messy when you show up. They may not have a dinner party outfit on but Rosaria Butterfield in her incredible book, The Gospel Comes with a House Key, says that “Hospitality is necessary whether you have cat hair on the couch or not. People will die of chronic loneliness sooner than they will cat hair in the soup”. You have to be the one to do this. Take it on. You can do it! The people around you are craving it. We all want to be a part of community. Few ever take the initiative to do something about it. You have the ability to be a literal lifesaving agent in peoples lives. And all of this is good practice even outside of loving Jesus. But for those of us that claim Jesus? This should be, no question, a critical part of your life and your ministry. Not because you want to change someones mind on what they believe, but because this is exactly what Jesus did.

I want to be careful to not make this an ego thing for me. I recognize that this blog could be seen as someone begging for attention on his birthday or hoping to finally get flooded with calls and texts. I promise I do not need those things to fill some attention need. To me, this is just me getting something off my chest. Writing has always helped me do that and I hope that if you have read all the way to here, that you too get something out of this. This is an unloading of a bit of real life that has made for a weirdly tensioned month in my world for a while. A way to get back to normal. Back to looking forward to this month as a chance to reconnect with so many people that I love. Back to feeling loved and celebrated. To eat a few brownies with my friends. That is my hope. I promise to get back to you if you FaceTime, or call or voice memo, or text on my birthday. Know now that it means the world to me. I would love to hear how you are doing, what’s going on in your life, what made you smile today and what songs you're listening to or even what's making you hurt a little bit.

Thank you for taking the time to read this. I am taking some time away from social media besides getting on to get this story out there so if you did read this and wouldn’t mind, shoot me a text or call or whatever. I would really appreciate it. I genuinely would love to hear from you. Yes, you! You reading this who maybe we haven’t talked in years.

719-231-9006.

My birthday is April 18th and for the first time in a while I am truly looking forward to that day.

I am so grateful for you. I love you. The good Lord loves you. Let’s party.

All the love.