Last full moon of the year and we BARELY made it, team! December’s full moon is known as The Cold Moon to the Mohawk, or The Long Night Moon to the Mohican (no relation to the unfairly maligned Game of Thrones battle royale episode). The European pagan name is the Yule Moon, which we celebrated in last week’s Fireflies. It’s a good time to start a diary; we recommend using the first entry to lay out all the loose ends you’d like to snip off before twirling into 2023.
Extra! Extra! Read all about it! Alert the box office boys! Shoot off the fireworks and let the doves fly! Something miraculous happened, something unexpected, something that could even be construed as beautiful: I only cried TWICE on my birthday this year!
The first time didn’t have anything to do with my birthday, I just saw a video of Lizzo’s beautiful speech at the People’s Choice Awards and Stevie Nicks’s sweet tweet about it. I can’t cry on command because I’m scared of actors and what makes them Like That, but I will instantly become a pile of weepy baby mush whenever people do something so sweet and human that it hurts. Like cute aggression, but cute upset-tion. Yikes.
The second sob was during a journaling exercise about how capital S Sad I always get on my birthday.
We interrupt this broadcast to bring you a brief diagnostic criteria for The Birthday Sads. If you or a loved one has suffered from TBS, you may be entitled to join the damn club.
Keeping a mental list AGAINST YOUR WILL of who has and has not messaged you to say, via some form of media, happy birthday. This is a great way to unintentionally find out where you stand with each of your exes. My current position is none of your damn business. Or mine, really.
Feeling a sinking, persistent heaviness in your bones and your spirit, like whatever you did do this year, whatever effort you put in, it wasn’t enough. You’re still not whole. You still haven’t lived up to whatever you COULD have done and been in the last 12 months.
Checking Instagram too often (how often is too often? If you’re asking this you’re already guilty) to scan for story mentions (more of a 2018 thing but legend says the college kids are still at it). A grid post? What is this, the Obama administration?
Wincing every time someone asks what you’re doing today because it’s not exciting and now you seem boring.
Wincing every time someone asks what you’re doing today because it’s deeply revealing of who you are as a person on a core level and that shit is way too vulnerable for a phone call with your aunt.
I KNOW IT’S NOT COOL TO CARE THIS MUCH ABOUT YOUR BIRTHDAY AS AN ADULT. What, exactly, about my Substack of personal essays led you to imagine I was intending to pass as cool? I don’t WANT to care this much! It’s fucking mortifying. I don’t *think* it comes from a place of attention-seeking; clearly I’m doing that in newsletter format. No, I think the preciousness with which I carry this day from one year to the next has more to do with a couple of my core wounds: fear of abandonment and lack of intrinsic value. But when was I wounded? And whomst hath done the wounding? And how do I put a Band-Aid on this bullet hole??
The Birthday Sads (TBS) were a deeply un-fun surprise addition to the growing older party. Maybe they started up in college, when birthdays transformed into another status symbol to prove how loved you were and in what ways, at least where I went to school. Kids there had too much of their parents money to spend on lavish annual affairs, especially when it came to the junior year right of passage known as Turning 21. Girls at other schools went on bar crawls with their friends and had cute themed signs with mild roastings and scavenger hunts. SMU girls had private flights to Vegas, week-long catamaran cruises, and a lot of Cartier and Hermès boxes to show for their endeavors (existing). My Super Sweet 16’s got nothing on SMU Sorority Girls Who Can Legally Drink Now.
My 21st birthday was less fantastical, but I do remember feeling a lot of love and basking in the grown girl glow. I didn’t get reeeeal sad about the yearly turning of the metaphorical page until after college. In adult world, my friends now had to spend their money, time, and energy to show up somewhere sometime in December in order to assuage my painful and shameful fear that they just didn’t care if I was even still breathing. They probably didn’t read that part of the fine print in the text invitations.
2018 was a particularly no good very bad birthday. Months of unease and discontent in my living situation came to a head and detonated all over my party. I lost two close friends and any sense of serenity in my home in the process. This was also the last time I even made an attempt toward a party that required the participation of other people.
After the explosion of the 2018 apartment party, I took a few different approaches to marking the moment. One year I literally flew to Norway to get the hell out of dodge; didn’t work, I cried on the frozen streets of Trondheim at 2 am. In 2020, I stayed home with my mom and wore my new ‘Anxiety’ sweater for dinner with family friends. I definitely cried that night but it was 2020 in Alabama and that gets a pass. Last year, I took the train up to Hudson and mostly really enjoyed the upstate atmosphere. I remember crying that night in an Airbnb, but I’ve had COVID three times now, so my brain scramblies don’t remember why.
Birthdays in a post-and-perennially-pandemic world have become one way to mark the time passing us by as it continues to feel like flexible, unstable jelly around us. I had just turned 25 when NYC went into lockdown. The three years that have passed since feel like a psychedelic trip I’m still waiting to come down from, envisioning a Keep Calm 2012 Pinterest post and white-knuckling it to the other side. But I think… I think this might be as close to the other side as we’re going to get.
I am now swimming in that disconcerting period of life known as your late 20s, when the glimmer of youth is well and truly fading (can’t use trampolines without pain anymore) and the reality of ‘death comes for us all’ is starting to feature more heavily in my intrusive thought exercises (those bitches are SPRINTING like Ryan Murphy is behind them with a pitch for a Gleeboot). Now, I feel an impending sense of dread and desire every time the calendar turns to December. In trying to outrun that dread, I climb a thousand feet above myself until I feel so far away from my feelings that I don’t feel much of anything at all. I am very scared of the big, bad, extremely ghostly emotions inspired by birthdays past. It’s possible I’ve accidentally Pavloved myself into anticipating disappointment.
Maybe TBS are an unfortunate side effect of being a December baby, stuffed snugly between holidays when people are already tired of celebrating and spending money and are all too aware of how much of both they still have to do. Maybe it has to do with my particular birthday, the 7th of December, falling on what was for a long time America’s 9/11 until, well, 9/11. MAYBE it’s because this year’s bday was on a damn Wednesday.
Probably not, though. Probably more of an ‘expectations breed disappointment’ type beat. A microcosm of New Year’s Eve culture, our most over-hyped and therefore consistently disappointing event.
So in the name of keeping out the bad vibes without getting altitude sickness, I chose another route this year; ignorance, in search of bliss. I spent the weeks leading in just flat-out refusing to make any plans, and then started low-volume panicking around 2pm that I hadn’t made the day special enough for myself, that I hadn’t taken full advantage of my allotted time to be adored. I puttered around my apartment, avoided writing this newsletter because I didn’t know wtf to say (jury’s still out), and went through the motions of getting ready to leave for one plan I’d made that evening. The panic passed sometime around sunset.
This bday was over faster than any that had come before. Somehow, though, it hurt a lot less, too. After completing my journal-out-your-feelings assignment, I could kind of walk around without them. My big scary emotions had passed through and passed on. Probably absolutely definitely tied to the whole Expectations to Disappointment Pipeline we mentioned earlier. Does it ever drive you crazy…. just how fast…. the night…. changes?
Last night, I put on an all-black outfit with a pink chore coat that I haven’t worn since I bought it for myself on my last birthday. I took the Q train into the city and waved hello to the glittering skyline while fog blanketed the buildings in FiDi, and left everything way too warm and a little too wet for December. I ate an early dinner at X'i’an Famous Foods and thought about Anthony Bourdain and how much I miss him. I wonder if he got sad on his birthday, too. I wonder if TBS tipped the scales in favor of the monsters that caught up to him in the end.
I went to a live figure drawing class in Two Bridges and focused really hard on feeling like myself, or at least feeling like someone I want to be. Someone who actually thinks their bangs look great rn, thx. Someone who has no time for misogynistic insecurities and lives fully, lovingly in their body every day. Someone who runs sprinting after what they want and the work it’ll take to get there, instead of nervously walking around the edge of the pool thinking of all the bad things that could happen if they ever get up the nerve to actually jump in.
I’ll be keeping this evening in mind when 29 comes a-calling. In the meantime, I’m making a physical list of my goals this year, so at least if I’m berating myself in 364 days I can be accurate about it.
Some birthday moments that actually weren’t physically painful but still stung a little psychically, thanks though!
Getting a midnight HBD text as soon as the clocks changed, even if it felt like an attack because they wrote ‘Namaslay’ as a signoff.
Wandering around downtown Manhattan on a weeknight in December at a concerningly-balmy 57 degrees, enjoying the holiday lights and little snippets of life visible through apartment windows while one of the voices in the back of your head yells CLIMATE CHANGE IS ALREADY HERE into a megaphone.
Listening to “Visions of Gideon” on the train, dissociating so forcefully that you can feel your consciousness floating outside your body, just above you, watching you breathe. The song embedded in the beginning of this email is a much more pleasant dissociative experience if you’re in the market <3
Reading a book about Paris in the bath at 3 pm on a Wednesday because you are the unemployed (freelance is sooooo close to unemployed; unemployed-fluid) friend at 3 pm on a Wednesday.
Getting an HBD text from someone you haven’t texted since the last time it was YOUR birthday, meaning you forgot their birthday, and now we can all see it in the text but we’re definitely not going to address it because that’s literally the only thing that could make this situation worse.
I’ll leave you with A Really Good Tiktok about our favorite feisty beeyotch.
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You’ll be thrilled beyond belief to hear that my hair and confidence have both grown since last moon’s essay. My dad said he notices the moon more now that familial obligation requires him to, and that she moves through her cycle a lot more quickly than he realized. What about you? Have you been moonfluenced too?
Sooooooooo so sad and unseriously,
Addison