I turned twenty two weeks ago. I spent the majority of the day and those leading up to it holding back tears or failing to do so. I don’t think it’s uncommon to cry on your birthday, and I think it may become more common as you grow up. Or perhaps not to cry but to not enjoy it, for the excitement to slow each year and to carry a heavy feeling in your chest as you approach it. But I guess what differs person to person is when these feelings start to appear; when you reach thirty? Fifty? Or younger? Maybe birthdays have held a trauma for you since your tenth birthday party when nobody showed up, maybe you stopped celebrating after your parents divorced just before your fourteenth?

I always loved birthdays; for me they meant being around family and feeling that warm fuzzy contentness that makes me think of Christmas lights before they became so harsh and bright. So that meant the heavy feeling appeared in my chest just before my seventeenth birthday, after loosing two family members in the summer. I want to say that the first birthday without them was the hardest but I don’t know that that’s true. The first was obviously hard, the emotions were still fresh and the funerals and interments not long passed but then each year I seemed to feel my grief arrive earlier than the last.

The following year was my eighteenth and that hurt twice as hard for twice the number of reasons. Eighteen is the big birthday, the important one, the one we all look forward to and fear at the same time, the fight between responsibilty and freedomn tossing up in your mind: you become an adult, you can vote, apply for a credit card, rent a flat, get married, get a tattoo and most importantly you can buy alcohol. But for me, both the fear and the excitement were easily beat by the grief that had nested within my heart over the past year and when all is said and done I’m afraid the heart will win the war with my mind anyday. I’d always imagined I’d have these people present for my eighteenth, the possibilty of them not being at the table had never crossed my mind, it’s not something I’d thought to prepare for. But that’s how it played out – consumed by pain.

Since turning seventeen I’d been in pain everyday without fail and to my despair I woke up on my eighteenth birthday in pain too. Pain that at this point in my life not a single person believed me about, pain that I had no answer for. So my birthday wish for my eighteenth birthday differed slightly to that for my seventeenth; at seventeen I wished for one more day with those I’d lost, or even just five more minutes. At eighteen I wished for one more day with those I’d lost, and for the pain to stop, even just for five minutes. It didn’t come true. Nor did it come true when it was my wish at nineteen. And it didn’t come true two weeks ago when it was my wish as I turned twenty. The difference between eighteen and twenty was simply the difference in hope, there was a lot less hope in the wish at twenty than there had been at eighteen. At eighteen both of those things felt slightly more possible. If I’d shut my eyes so tight they hurt and dug my nails so deep into the memory of them that I drew blood then when I opened my eyes I’d see them sat in front of me. At twenty I knew that wasn’t true, I knew my pain had replaced their presence in my life and the wish was as good as asking to be a billionare, but I still shut my eyes tight and wished nonetheless. And when I opened them all I could see through the blurry threat of tears was the dried blood under my finger nails because for the third year in a row it hadn’t come true. For a third year in a row they weren’t here and my pain was. The disappointment wasn’t so sharp now, more like a tender bruise than a fresh wound, but I’m scared it won’t ever fully heal.

So I spent my twentieth birthday holding back tears, choking on years of grief that promised to drown me if I let it loose. Grief not just for those I lost but also for myself too, I lost her somewhere beneath all of this pain and I miss her the most. I miss who I could have been without all the pain, what I could have achieved, the life I could have lived. I think I grieved her the most this year, I suppose because there’s more to grieve, another year. Equally I worked the evening of my birthday, not that that really bothered me, but being surrounded by people telling me they’d give anything to be my age, that I have so much life ahead of me, or asking me how I plan to celebrate made it harder to keep the grief below the surface. I know the remarks were said with good intentions but each one seemed to twist on the knife already hilt deep in my heart, one that I’d almost learnt to ignore all together. But the sudden impact let a warm trail of blood trickle down my front, something I hadn’t felt in a while, and perhaps the shock in remembering that it was still there when I looked down was part of the pain.

The feeling has lingered over the past two weeks, it’s weighed heavily on me that my life isn’t how I imagined it would be at twenty and it’s slowly tearing me apart inside. Grief will do that to you. I think it’s most evident over the past three years that grief presents itself for me most prominently as anger. So much of my grief was expressed as anger and so much that has happened over the past three years fueled that anger, genuine frustration and rage – at people: doctors, family, friends, partners, colleagues, strangers, at the world, at my body, at myself. And that anger has reignited, hand in hand with the grief since my birthday, realising that I’ve spent the last three years in all kinds of pain and I’ve spent every second doing everything I can to hide it. That anytime I tried to express it I was shut down so fast I learnt to stop trying. Even in pain that had me walking the line of insanity I didn’t want to incovenience anyone, I pushed through the screams and pleas of my body to slow down so as not to be a burden on others. And I think that angers me most of all – that I’ve put my emotions last my entire life and here I am reaping the consequences. That nobody acknowledged my pain when it was just a spark, a mere warning and now that I’m engulfed in flame they’re too scared to get burnt to care that I’m burning alive.

I turned twenty two weeks ago and today I woke up in pain as usual, but I didn’t sigh at the thought of pretending all day, I didn’t rush to hide any evidence that it was there, I let it show. I don’t want to make anybody else’s life easier if it means I have to survive mine – I was made to live too.