The Birthday People: Why Birthdays Can Hurt More Than We Admit

Jul 24
3 min read

Updated: Jul 28

A new book about family, loneliness, grief, belonging, and the difficult feelings that can gather around one day of the year

Birthdays are "supposed to feel special.

There should be cake, messages, people who remember, and some clear sense that your life matters to others.

For many people, that is exactly what a birthday is. It is warm, uncomplicated, and worth looking forward to.

For others, the day carries more weight.

Like me.

A birthday can become a yearly reminder of who remembers, who makes an effort, and whether you are as important to other people as they are to you. It can bring up old family wounds, disappointment, loneliness, grief, shame, or the quiet fear that nobody really knows how much the day matters.

My new book, The Birthday People: Why Some of Us Dread the Day We Are Supposed to Feel Special, began with my own complicated relationship with birthdays.

For a long time, I hated my birthday.

Sometimes I acted as though I simply did not care. Sometimes I made jokes about getting older. Sometimes I filled the day with dinners, parties, drinking, noise, and enough activity to avoid sitting too quietly with myself.

But the day still had a way of reaching places that ordinary days could not.

One of my earliest birthday memories was of a party being cancelled because I had been “naughty”. I was still a child. The food had been prepared. Friends were supposed to come. Then the whole thing was taken away.

Later, birthdays became tied to darker periods of my life. There was a time when I did not believe I would live past twenty-one. Each year felt less like a celebration and more like another step towards an ending I had already imagined.

Even when my life became safer, birthdays remained difficult. A part of me wanted someone to think ahead, to know what I might like, and to make an effort without being asked. Another part of me panicked when attention arrived. I did not want the birthday song. I did not want a surprise. I did not want an entire room looking at me while I tried to appear comfortable.

For years, I thought I simply hated birthdays.

I eventually realised that I hated how much they could reveal.

As a psychologist, I began noticing the same complexity in therapy.

People rarely came in because of a birthday alone. The day would appear somewhere inside a larger story: a relationship conflict, a family wound, a period of grief, a sense of being forgotten, or the painful realisation that life had not turned out the way they once imagined.

Someone might say birthdays were meaningless, then become quiet when a parent forgot.

Someone else might have a full room, a good meal, and friends who cared, yet feel deeply empty once everyone went home.

Another person might plan birthdays carefully for everyone around them, while quietly wondering why nobody seemed to take the same initiative for them.

Some people dreaded being celebrated because attention brought shame.

The stories in this book draw from real emotional patterns I have encountered in therapy, alongside my own experiences and reflections.

This is a book about birthdays, but it is also about families, relationships, belonging, memory, grief, and the wish to be held in another person’s mind.

It is for the person who watches the messages come in and notices the ones that do not.

It is for the person who says, “It’s just another day,” while still feeling hurt when someone important forgets.

It is for the person who wants to be celebrated but feels exposed when everyone turns to look at them.

People often tell themselves they are too old to care. They minimise their disappointment before anyone else can judge it. They insist that other people have bigger problems. They try to be grateful, mature, casual, and easy.

But birthdays can carry years of emotional history.

The Birthday People is an attempt to understand these contradictions.

It does not argue that everyone should care about birthdays. It does not tell people how they ought to celebrate. It looks at why the day can become so emotionally charged, and why something that appears small from the outside can touch such a tender place inside us.

Sometimes the real question is not, “Why am I making such a big deal out of this?”

It is:

“What story is this day touching?”

That is where the book begins.

Here's a preview of the book below in PDF form - help support by purchasing the book too okay? Proceeds go to supporting a mental health initiative I run in Singapore! Take care,

Hernping