The Only-Ever Birthday Girl
All of my birthdays are woven with serendipity, and my life is very important.
I am going pro at being self-centered.
I turned 28 in June, and I had the best self-centered birthday yet.
I’ve felt that way every year, ever since I decided I would be a hands-on, self-centered birthday girl.
Let me start by saying: I know self-centered people who absolutely suck. And I don’t want to be the big bang, spawning a litter of evil self-centered babies. It’s absolutely possible to misinterpret what I’m saying here. I want to endorse the proper kind of self-centeredness. I don’t conflate being self-centered with being inconsiderate of others. I do consider others. I just consider myself first. And I do something about that, because it’s no one else’s job to make my life better. That’s my job.
Even if i trend towards altruism, I can’t say that I’m solely motivated by it. At the end of the day, it actually makes me a better person to be surrounded by equally self-oriented, self-sustained, self-assured type-people. While I could frame this essay as if I’m being very selfless, bestowing knowledge and birthday itineraries, I am insisting that everyone else join me on a similar-but-separate journey of bettering themselves. So that I can be around better people.
For the sake of being likable, I balance an appropriate amount of Me First and Others Matter Too. I don’t act sneaky about this internal battle between good-self centered and evil-self centered. My stream of consciousness pours out of my mouth, even when I don’t want it to. I say thinly veiled things that outline my real intentions.
I want to be a supportive friend and I want the best for my friends. Really, I want to have the Best friends, and I love watching people get better. In exchange, I want supportive friends, and I want my friends to want the best for me, too. I want them to help me get better.
I am quick to announce when I think someone is misaligned with my ever-changing, always-improving values.
So I am an asshole, with a finite amount of tolerance.
And I’m forthcoming about that. And I’m given a lot of grace, it seems.
If my honesty and transparency isn’t what earns me patience, it might be a privilege I get for being pretty. It could be because I offer lots of attention and bestow my wisdom freely, maybe because I can be particularly silly or witty, because I like to dress up for the occasion, I smile and happily introduce myself to strangers. It could be because I’m good at planning. Maybe Its my astute observations about light fixtures and human behavior that they would absolutely die without. Maybe all of it lumped together outweighs the evil-selfish-baby that likes to remind me: it knows how to walk.
I can’t fail to mention the big one: I’m very motivated by my desire to have people to say positive things about me, to my face and behind my back. And that’s probably because I keep making the mistake in thinking that what people say about me is a reflection of who I am.
The important thing is, I want to feel positive about my life, so I make the effort. I’m the producer and the director. This first came to shine in my birthday planning, and then it trickled into the rest of my life.
I had to learn to feel positive about myself, which kind of sucked, because it’s so easy to backslide.
It takes way less effort for me to make other people feel positive, for some reason.
I guess it’s not as hard to ask people defining questions, and figure out what they like and how and why. It’s not hard to see the sweetness in other people, if you look out for it. It’s kind of difficult to turn inward and do all of that with yourself. It can feel psychotic.
It’s probably hard to see the reflection of who you are all by yourself, because if you see something first hand, you know it’s really there. If that something is unappealing, you will probably want to change it. Which means responsibility, time and effort.
When someone else points out something they don’t like about you, it’s easy to call them an asshole and move on, changing nothing.
So when I call myself self-centered, I am referring to the hard-work I’ve put in over the last couple years, learning about myself, and reworking the rough edges.
When I was still living in NYC, I started doing the things I had on my How to be a Good New Yorker list, and I was planning these day-long itineraries to do all by myself. It was easier than coordinating with my friends, who had and still have different schedules, partners and priorities, layered over How to Be Good lists of their own. I used to be very codependent with my friends, actually. And very focused on numbers, and popularity, and not so much focused much on quality and shared interests.
So I was having fun doing the things I wanted to do, when I wanted to do them. I enjoyed spending days in a row operating entirely based on my whims, wearing what I wanted and leaving when I was done. But it kinda started to feel silly, being in crowded NYC, doing things alone. I wrote a Substack article about that.
The mindset shift is: the rest of things on my list will remain there, and I’d maybe like to do them with someone who matches my interests, who can offer me lots of attention and bestow wisdom freely, maybe someone who can be particularly silly or witty, who likes to dress up for the occasion, who smiles and happily introduces themselves to strangers. While I think the joy of a great trip is worth the time and effort it takes to plan, I’d like to spend time with someone who is equally good at planning trips, and who fills the air with astute observations about design and history, so I can have a more layered experience.
Those are the kinds of things, the kinds of people and experiences that make for a particularly good birthday, and a particularly good life. By my definition.
And I have been living to refine the definition of a good life. It’s a pursuit that helped me decide to move to the Colorado mountains, to figure myself out in a vacuum. To factor in the Great Outdoors to my life equation. To get more specific with my preferences, and how I define myself.
I have to mention sobriety here— I’m not taking credit for the self-actualization journey, im not claiming to be some incredible internally-motivated self-starter type. The whole pursuit is domino effect from when I got sober.
Sobriety opens up a cavernous amount of spare time. Like, I had way more spare time than anyone else in my life. I also recognized that other people do not exist to be NPCs who I can activate for my own quests. For those of you who don’t play video-games, NPC means Non-Playable Character. My friends are not extensions of me and my life.
You can probably understand better, my motivation for doing things alone, when you understand what getting sober feels like.
I metaphorically cleaned off my sunnies with a glasses-cloth, if you can imagine a pair of sunnies had been smudged up over days of non-stop partying. The hangover finally clears and you’re wiping off the smudgy fingerprints and splotches from all of your stuff, and you’re happily surprised to find the sunglasses at all. So I’m looking through these newly cleaned sunglasses at my life, and things look different. Like, unfamiliar.
The uncomfortable time when I first came crashing down to earth-as-is, I didn’t actually know what I liked at all, because I didn’t even know what I was looking at. I didn’t know who people were, and what they really looked like, because I’d been looking at them smudgy and filling in the blanks. Same goes for places and activities. I’d been listening to context clues instead of seeing things for myself.
Cue: self-centeredness.
I’ve gotten more comfortable with naming things what I think they are, instead of what I heard someone else call them. I have the intention to form a clear perspective and make an opinion. As much as I’d like to accumulate positive memories, I enjoy ranking my experiences in an honest, personal way. Not all of my experiences have been totally amazing. My goal lately is to name that, and to workshop my life into something that I can mostly call amazing, by my own definition.
That definition looks different for everyone. Which is why I cannot confidently say my perfect birthday could be your perfect birthday. I can confidently say that I’ve been able to celebrate my birthday in a way that brings me a lot of joy that year. I keep mentioning what a great planner I am, so I will talk about the itineraries. But I care more about what birthday plans say about me at that time. What I chose to do each year illuminates what my values were, and who I really wanted to be.
The TLDR on how to have A perfect birthday is to get to know yourself super well. Once you spend time alone, you learn what you enjoy. that’s a better frame of reference than a Tiktok itinerary, or a travel blog, or reading what I did for My birthday.
Anyway, let’s talk what I did for my birthday!
My 24th Birthday
But First, quickly, all of the birthdays before my 24th birthday:
I’ve always had special birthdays. I have never been forgotten about. I get lots of texts that wish me a happy birthday. My mom is a Martha Stewart type (host by nature) and has delighted in putting together parties for me since I was little. I had summer-camp-tie-dye-t-shirt birthdays and movie-night sleepover birthdays. I had multiple birthday weekends spent with a rotating cast of girls at my grandma’s beach-house in LBI. My mom hosted girl-boy backyard parties with bouncy castles, and later, girl-boy backyard parties with sneaky Poland springs bottles of alcohol and sneaky kisses at the spring-fed lake down the street.
I figured out at a young age that I could ask my mom for what I wanted to do on my birthday and she would listen. In my pre-teen years I would tell my mom I wanted the whole house in streamers, or my room filled to the brim with balloons, and she would do just that. Only thing is, even when I got exactly what I asked for on my birthday, I was still a self-loathing birthday crier.
I knew it was ungrateful behavior, and that I must be a naturally horrible person because of it; A fact, then, making it much easier to cry harder. I forget how old I was when I learned that you can hyper-focus on really-sad-things that prove your sadness and self loathing to be True, in order to keep being super melodramatic. Which felt good. I reveled a bit in my self-judgement ritual, which felt much easier than celebrating myself. It totally bit me in the ass, because the habit of self loathing was a really tough one to kick. It kind-of morphed itself into a depressive existential-dread that snuck up on days that weren’t my birthday.
A few things pushed me towards wanting to be a self-loving birthday-celebrator. One, was the awful feeling of not wanting to celebrate myself, and the feeling good about feeling awful. Another, the clear rupture between my reality and the way I felt about my reality. And I did know that my life was easy to celebrate, and that I deserved to feel good about myself for at least one day a year. Ideally more, but starting with one.
20th birthday Meltdown shout out
I turned 20 in Greece. I was studying abroad for 6-weeks, with a focus in Performance and Gender Studies. I wish I could say I chose it myself. This was a necessary treat, to fulfill the credits I needed to graduate on time, since I had taken a semester off my junior year. Special thanks to my 2nd-ever jump-scare manic episode. We thought my original diagnosis was a drug-induced fluke. And I kept doing drugs, because I simply had to participate in the syllabus week bender. So the following summer I found myself on an academic vacation in Greece, and I had a lingering-post-manic-depression that I was funking around in. All the greek-life kids had buddied up by week two of the trip, and by the time we got to Mykonos, there were also some friendships that were turning sour. Considering these were greek-life friendships, the drama was mostly regarding social climbing and roommate drama. My birthday rolled up on the last week of the trip. I don’t want to be entirely biased, considering the tensions were already high within the group, and I was in the proper downward spiral you get from experiencing depression-in-paradise. Needless to say my birthday was a bit of a flop. We spent 6 hours on a bus to Tolo, and arrived to the hotel in a rainstorm. My little friend group was mid-deterioration, and no one seemed excited about leaving the property for a celebratory dinner. I felt awkward about that, and we wound up eating bad food at the hotel, despite it being My Special Day. My family hadn’t called (due to the time difference, and the fact my Dog randomly died that day, which I’d later learn) and I was just about ready to drown myself in the Greek ocean. The professor on the trip got me a cake, and I had gotten myself nice and boozed up with shitty champagne (I was not the only one drinking, but I was definitely the most drunk). I held back tears while the class sang to me, and then I had a total Fucking Meltdown on the side of the quiet road in front of the hotel. After this trip, I stopped being friends with all but 2 of the people in our little Greek posse. Not because the birthday thing per se, but because one of my Pre-Trip friends texted our Back-at-School friend group that I was crying-suicide for attention. I can admit that I do a lot of things with the hope that someone is, or will be paying attention to me. And my friend-group-friends should know that I am a bit too vain to want my attention to be over a cry for help. I don’t mind saying out loud: I would like to be adored. And this birthday helped me recognize a few things. 1. I only want to spend my birthday with people who have, or will extend me grace for being myself (for better or for worse). 2. Being on a trip makes for a great birthday, even if you wind up drunk, scream crying to people who are not your friends. It’s nice to be doing some rogue shit somewhere new and pretty. 3. Exploring, going to a nice restaurant, and eating good food are all things I enjoy doing, and I learned that when I was prevented from doing them at the hands of someone else. These are easy checkboxes for having a Great Birthday.
21st birthday mention
I had one full 21-year-old Jersey-Shore summer before Covid shut everything down. My parents met at the Parker house, and I spent my whole life hearing about how Awesome it was to party in God’s Basement. I was no stranger to getting absolutely wasted with a bunch of preppy upper-crust kids, but I was super excited to be drinking in an Establishment that year. I had invited a group of my friends from college and my girlfriends from highschool to hangout at the beach, and pregame at a new marina-bar before going “out-out”. I expected to grill burgers or something, because the food at the marina-bar notoriously sucked, but my mom had sneaky-planned a surprise dinner party at the house. We set up our front porch with the decorations we used for my 18th birthday, when I had a colorful dinner-party in my back yard. My 18th Birthday ended with 10 girls cramming in an uber and whisking off to party hop at a few random addresses we were sent via text. This was a classic RBC summer, and it had nothing to do with the fact it was my birthday. Now that I was 21, I was ready to whisk off and bar-hop, and my mom going behind my back was totally sabotaging that! Mind you: I was delighted that the guy I liked back at school had decided he’d be joining the celebration. I’d hoped he’d come, but I didn’t think he actually would. He took a shit in my upstairs bathroom the second he arrived. Their bags were meant to go in the basement, not in my room. While he was probably embarrassed about shitting in my personal bathroom, I was very embarrassed when he witnessed me get bamboozled with a dinner-party surprise, instead of the food-less pregame I had advertised. When the news of the surprise broke, I hid up in my room for longer than I was supposed to. My friends had to talk me down from my special whiney-teary-high-pitched annoyance. They insisting that the table looked good and that it wasn’t weird or embarrassing at all, it was actually very nice.
I can safely look back and recognize that the dinner party was, in fact, very nice. The table scape was beautiful, and I was being a bitch. I finally emerged in the backyard and joined my friends in drinking cocktails, while the food was Brought to out to the decorated table on the front porch. I did become a happy birthday girl again when the group meandered through the house to hang out front, with a buzz, under colorful streamers and the gold “21” balloons that I had specifically requested for photoshoot purposes. I think I was still vegan at the time, because I remember there being two whole foods cakes: one vegan, one not. I am the type of birthday girl who does not feel particularly surprised by 2 cakes.
My mom wanted us to stay and drink at the house for the whole night, because 3 of the people I invited were not 21 (including the guy I liked). I insisted that we would not be doing that. I ditched the underage guy and went to Parker House for the first time with everyone else, like the stubborn birthday girl I wanted to be. I saw a different older-than-21 year old Boy from college who I also liked, and my birthday was officially made. I’m not sure he even said more than Hello. I should have spent far more time being embarrassed about how boy-crazy I was back then, and far less time getting annoyed at people for considering me.
22nd and 23rd birthday I do not specifically remember. I also don’t have photo evidence from these years, because my camera roll was not backed up in 2020-2022. I break my phone often, and I had no other way of intentionally preserving memories (not even collecting matchboxes, even though I probably went out to dinner somewhere nice-enough). I probably felt like an afterthought, leaning into my self-loathing feedback loop. And that definitely pissed me off. Especially since covid had introduced me to Tiktok, and I had an algorithm of it-girls living very celebratory lives. It had become very clear for me: I also want to live a celebratory life.
Kinda felt like I needed to create a life-worth-living for myself, honestly. I knew myself well enough at this point to know that I wanted to be an it-girl type. I probably had this figured out in my early childhood, when I started identifying with the supernatural main characters in popular youth-fiction novels. But I was actually pretty far off, considering I felt like a regular-degular slightly-above-average girl from New Jersey. I knew by now the kind of places I liked to eat, and the types of places I liked to say I’ve been to.
My college education was largely an education in socioeconomic status and wealth indicators. And as someone who wants to be wealthy, that was super helpful. Post-grad in NYC had only refined that knowledge and heightened my aspirations.
And because I have a late-June birthday, I was smart to capitalize on the fact that my equally ambitious, well-positioned yuppie-type friends would also like to see and be seen in summer destinations. Enter: the birthday trips.
ALL MY BEST BIRTHDAYS
For Real this time:
My 24th Birthday: Newport, Rhode Island
It’s important to mention: I had learned what a WASP was in college, and I experienced what JAPPY meant in my post-grad NYC years (I also learned the word “JAPPY” in college, but only what my West Chester-based friend group described; there were very few Jewish American Princesses at Villanova, if any at all. I never knew any personally, until a few years after graduation. I definitely enjoy the company of what you’d call a “JAPPY” girl). So what I’m trying to say is that I got my little education in the insular and elitist religious groups. And I desperately wanted to belong to one, seeing that my experience as a Roman Catholic paled in comparison to what the WASPs and the Jews were getting up to. It broke my spirit when I learned that neither the WASPs nor the Jews would accept me into their respective colonies. The best I could manage was to float myself in adjacent spaces. Soak it all in.
So for my 24th birthday, my first ever birthday trip, I chose to do just that in Newport, Rhode Island.
I knew Newport was a particularly wasp-y from word-of-mouth. I had driven out of my way to spend a day there during a post-grad road-trip to Boston with my college friends. I loved telling people about the day-trip, mostly because I liked to do things and to go places that said something positive about me. Or in this case: made me sound and seem like a coastal elite. With a full weekend of time and a group of friends with similar interests, I was able to over-stack the weekend with plans. While I was largely motivated by aesthetics (I still am) and performing (I still am) I was also genuinely excited about how much historical and cultural context there was to explore in the town of Newport. It seemed like everything had layers. God, I’m so deep.
But seriously, in the way my planning this trip informed my experience on this trip was huge for my development. I learned that pop-culture and history embedded in experiences make me feel awesome. I like knowing about things while I’m doing them. And this is probably the most important checkbox i’ve yet to add on the list of How to make a birthday super lovely, and how to make myself feel super important and special and good at doing things. This pursuit is probably my favorite part about myself. I like how I think, participate, and plan. I learned how to think, participate, and plan at 24. I started liking myself at… 27.
Anyways.
The group trickled in starting Thursday, and we had a little condo-style hotel room that was weirdly cheap for how much space we got.
I didn’t realize that the nightlife was so fun in Newport, so we got wasted at One Pelham East every single night. Starting the first night, which was the night before my birthday. Meaning I woke up on my birthday still-drunk and nosediving to a pretty-shitty hangover.
On this trip, we crossed off most of our activities hungover and hair-of-the dog drinking. The bolded events on my shared-doc were: sailboat-tour of the gilded mansions, polo match, oyster happy hour at the Vanderbilt Mansion, Newport-Bermuda yacht-race, and a men-must-wear-a-jacket-dress-code dinner on the third floor of Clarke’s Cooke House. It was an alcoholic-ship-captain dream. I did not cry on my Birthday, for I was the alcoholic ship captain, and it was my dream. Even double-fisting a dirty-shirly-temple bloody-mary combo, hungover as shit at a family-friendly event felt Very Refined.
I mainly celebrated the actual day of my birthday double-fisting at the boat race and sloshing back martinis and wine at dinner, and I left the rest of the trip to feel like a well-planned vacation for my friends. This was a strategy, mostly so that I wouldn’t get an insane reputation for being a self-obsessed monster. Everyone was happy to be feeling upper-crust in Newport to begin with, and I was happy to be around happy people. I wanted to manifest and cosplay, and by using this trip, I could imagine and play pretend that my life had always been this way (beautiful, fun, elite-adjacent, full of things to do and places to be). Planning and researching so heavily in advance allowed me an experience that unfolded like walking on clouds. Things just worked out for me (because I studied, booked, and timed things to feel that wayl)
The better-thought out the birthday, the better the year, and eventually, the better the life. I swear. It’s habit-forming. It teaches you to plan for and look for the good. To situate yourself in the good, and then to seek out the best. I have very high expectations for my 50s and my 60s, as you could imagine.
*Disclaimer: this kind of experience is obviously an investment. I like to frame it as a course-in-refinement and learning-from-experience type. On a higher level, with this sort of event, you’re buying cultural and social capital, and losing some financial capital. First: this trip tells you that I am A Birthday Girl, that my friends respect my pursuit of Birthdays and Refinement. I will also tell you that I had $20k of waitressing money saved up by the time I turned 24, so I didn’t feel a financial burden from blowing money on this trip. I don’t really remember where the rest of that 20k went. I have enough money (far less than 20k, but enough) to live an equally good life and to celebrate equally perfect birthdays, and I also have more social and cultural capital. I have great memories, and great photos, and a point of reference. I believe that what I gained is invaluable. It geared me up appropriately to walk towards the type of life I want to live. Which is a great gift to give yourself on your birthday.
Because I started to listicle, I feel like I should keep listicling. I don't really want to.
My 25th birthday was celebrated twice.
Weekend before: NYC
I invited my girlfriends from Philly to join me in NYC the weekend before my actual birthday, since they couldn’t/wouldn’t/didn’t want to go on a bender with me in Montauk. I also invited a few other city-friends to dinner and dancing, since they had declined the weekend-trip invitation as well. I loved having visitors when I lived in the city, because I got to role-play like my life was also a vacation, and that I had mastered The Best City in the World. We went to Indochine for dinner and got very espresso martini drunk in the very iconique dining room. We followed that with a night at Little Sister, because I wanted to feel like hot shit, getting in to a club with a hard door. I bought a vape in the bathroom and danced to Rap and drank with and from random tables, feeling like the coolest, hottest new-york-piece-of-shit version of myself, in my shiny silver pants. They were new, as I felt the need to treat myself for the entire month of June, as a quarter-century birthday gift.
Official Quarter-Life Crisis: Montauk
The following weekend in Montauk was just as drunk and debauched and instagram-showy as I wanted it to be. I rented $800 dresses and ate $100 lobster salad at Duryea’s. I took pictures of all of it and showed everyone online how important and expensive I was. I felt more proud than smug. I was with my most down-to-drink friends, getting invited to weird afters in beautiful homes, and I felt like I was figuring it all out.
*Disclaimer: I checked my bank statement mid-Montauk trip and learned that I owed Amex $10,000 that I didn’t have, thanks to the aspirational and out-of-touch lifestyle I had been living.
For my party-friends, it was more about the well-planned vacation and opportunity to drink around people who Are Rich and who Know Things, than it was about my birthday. We spent the day-of my birthday nursing hangovers on the beach, taking pictures and BeReals and showing everyone online how Cool and Fun we were. The afternoon rain sent us inside, where we drank and got pretty and willed the good weather back, so we could drink and be attractive out on the hotel lawn, before our Crows Nest dinner res. I felt super fucking cool, obviously, as I had planned this trip for weeks, ensuring that every sceney talked-about hot-spot was on and subsequently crossed-off of my list. The goal was to be able to talk about Montauk with strangers at the bars in the future, and to let them assume I had been there countless times (I’d still like people to look at me and think I frequent the Hamptons, because it is a very nice place. It deserves the reputation it has. Lovely hedges).
Aside from the fact that I got mud splattered on both of the rented cult Gaia dresses, I felt Actualized. Influencers were staying at our hotel, so I knew I had done a good job picking that out. We chit-chatted with them at the pool, despite how annoying it felt to be around other girls who not only seemed to have mastered girlhood, but capitalized on it (something I have not quite figured out how to do in a way that doesnt feel Evil). There was a different girl I had met in front of Surf Lodge who posted with me on the first slide of her Montauk carousel. While it likely a choice made by what my expensive dress said about the company she keeps, I felt very Hot and Important and Good about myself. The actual owner of the dress charged me for dry-cleaning.
My main take away from the Montauk trip was similar to my take away from Newport. This time, I felt like I was voyuering a more showy kind of wealth that didn’t quite sit right with my spirit. I liked the scenery of Montauk, and the way that it felt like New York City had been transplanted on a beach. I feel glad that I didn’t have the kind of money to spend on designer, because at the time, I totally would have—if only to prove that I Belonged in the same rooms. Now, I associate designer with a feeling of insecurity, that you maybe otherwise wouldn’t feel like you belonged in the room without it. Of course, there are levels to it— but I’m talking about items, not personal style. And thats another thing: I think renting clothes and shopping and trying to look-the-part for who I wanted to become was actually very helpful for my birthday manifesting process. When I saw my first audemar piguet at Surf Lodge, I snapped a picture and texted it to my watch-lover brother. I thought luxury watches maxed out at Rolex and Patek and Cartier. Even if I couldn’t afford the designer things I maybe deemed worth buying, it was nice to have an idea in my head, and a little bit of discernment with it. I was learning so much at my birthday in the Hamptons!
Truth: I felt like a birthday in Montauk gave me social capital, more than anything. Saying you're going to be in the Hamptons, or have been to the hamptons, feels very elite. Saying you did so on your birthday makes you feel very cool and very important, and like your equally cool and important friends love you very much, seeing that they blow money and PTO on celebrating your birthday. But that's kind of the perk when you plan to celebrate your birthday in cool places where people want to go visit, especially if they care equally as much about gaining social capital.
Truth: Montauk also made me feel in-over-my-head. Not just financially. The come-down from my 4-day bender hit really hard. I felt like a fucking loser idiot baby, and not a Mature and Beautiful 25 year old, headed on to a Wonderful Beautiful Expensive life. After crying to my parents about feeling like a total fucking mess, I decided to live at home until after summer. I subleased my apartment at reduced-rent to an intern (my little brother). I still spent a few weekends delegating him to the couch, and yelling at him for not washing my sheets.
My 26th Birthday: Los Angeles
My first sober birthday was not intended to be a direct response to my previous birthday. There was a lot of other dumb shit I did that led to me getting sober in December, halfway between the two birthdays.
I had floated the idea of going to the New York ballet on my birthday. My sober friends were down, because sober people are usually down to do random things, and My party friends hated my idea (they had gone to Nashville and Miami for their birthdays, respectively). According to their judgement, the ballet was lame, boring, and meant for old ladies. I was already grappling with the idea of becoming lame and boring myself, seeing that I was a newly-sober party-girl. So I got kinda rattled by the feedback, because I do get rattled by things. In my head, I was like: you guys are assholes, I’m going to visit my best friend in LA, and no one is invited, except my other best friend.
And that’s what I did.
This was the year that I decided I didn’t really want to be friends with assholes. I would later redefine assholes as people who aren’t aligned with the current version of me.
The day before my birthday, we were invited to a day-hang at an oceanfront bungalow in Malibu. These are my best friend’s new friends, and they are fun. They drink, but they’re not drinking on this day. I think about that a lot, because I don’t know many people who hang out without drinking, unless I met them in an AA back-room. I remember sitting on the porch, overlooking an ocean that I consider way too cold to swim in, and thinking about how fucking great I feel. Being in such a beautiful house, with beautiful people and a beautiful view (I do not think about how superficial I am in moments like this, I think about it later, when I re-read my writing about it). I think about how grateful I am that everyone is so friendly and social, and I think about how I don’t feel boring or lame, or like a loser, when I’m in good company. I think about how maybe New York is not for me right now, because I don’t feel this good there, lately. The eve of my birthday is perfect, and I like that, because it takes the pressure off of the actual birthday-day.
My actual 26th birthday didn’t feel that celebratory, but it did feel like The most Perfect regular day I could have. My best friends woke me up on the couch with pastries and coffee, and it was exactly the pastries I would’ve wanted to try, with exactly the people I like to try things with. The whole day was great, but this was the most special. I love eating sweets with my best friends.
We went on a morning hike, which made me feel very Wholesome, considering I was too hungover to do much movement the past two years. I also have an disordered-eating type tick, so I was glad to immediately walk-off the morning sweets. :)
It’s the first year I spent in a museum on my birthday (we went to the LACMA) and I went shopping at the Wasteland in WeHo, which I had previously declared to be my favorite LA thrift store. I felt proud of myself for having a favorite LA thrift store, despite not living there. I recognized that as much as I love the adventure and newness of travel, there are times where familiarity and comfort fill me more. I felt like I super-honored myself as a person for the first time in my life on this birthday, instead of honoring the idea of who I wanted to be. I was and am very proud of these two best friends, and I felt proud to clock that being with just-them was entirely perfect way to celebrate. This is the first time I recognized I don’t actually need a whole entourage of people around, in order to feel good about myself. *Especially when the people do not make me feel good about myself. I tolerated a lot of that over the years, for numbers sake.
My best friend also brought a small group out to dinner at Cobi’s, which was a restaurant of her choosing, located near her apartment in Santa Monica. I normally like to pick restaurants, because I have turned into a total snob about when and where and what I will eat. The restaurant couldn’t have been a more perfect meal or setting for what I wanted. And I felt really glad to be seen and understood and catered towards on my birthday, hands-off.
My 27th Birthday: Paris
This is a flex. I don’t know what else to say. Thanks to one of my close-friends getting married in Ireland, I was able to spend my birthday in Paris. I met my two best friends from the year prior, and had the most perfect birthday day to-date. I wore a funky, colorful little outfit, and I clocked that I enjoy over-dressing on my birthday, even if the people I’m with look normal.
Earlier on the trip, I had pavlova for the first time. I decided on the spot that Pavlova won the title of my new favorite dessert (im not sure what my favorite dessert was, prior to that moment. I like icing). So we got pavlova on the morning of my birthday at some Special bakery, and we marched around the Eiffel Tower until we found a perfectly secluded patch of grass. We rolled out the Turkish towel that was purchased in Marseille a few days earlier, and snacked on our assortment of pastries. We had also picked up sketchpads and colorful fine-tip markers at the French version of Blick and spent hours drawing and chatting and listening to music.
I decided out-loud that a perfect fall-back birthday would be drawing in the park with a picnic and a playlist. I said that in front of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, so the bar is set kind-of high. (I don’t love having high-expectations. It makes me nervous about feeling disappointment. I do like feeling fulfilled enough in a moment to project it into future moments).
I loved making artifacts on my birthday. It felt special and symbolic to have more than an instagram and a memory to remember the day.
We had to pull ourselves from the park because of our plans to squeeze in 2 museums. I thought it would be cool to honor where I sit on both ends of a sliding scale: eccentric leaning towards weird as fuck, and refined leaning towards prissy and premadonna. We went first to the petite Palais, and we were happily surprised to find a Haute Couture exhibit showing. I had developed a growing interest in fashion (moreso the sociology and politics of fashion) and I was delighted to learn more about the history, since I feel so far behind on knowing literally anything. After this exhibit, we took the train across town to the Outsider art museum, La Halle Saint-Pierre. It was uncanny and creepy and dope, it was colorful, and animatronic stuffed animals were set on fire, and islamic artists made colorful google-faced artworks that I was able to look at and think: I could do this. I was very happy with the visit. I was supremely happy that we pulled off going to both museums, and having a spectrum of experiences on my birthday. This is a modern luxury.
I did fuck up the dinner res (I had intended to dine at Julia Child’s favorite restaurant, Chez George, and accidentally booked a cocktail bar by the same name). A quick and panicked search on Infatuation led me to book a tiny-concept type restaurant, Double, that gave us 8-course tasting menu experience-type meal. I asked the only waitress for the playlist, which featured Claire, and a bunch of random foreign songs. She did not speak good English, and had no idea what the fuck I was asking her. She also got pissed when I asked for salt, and so did my best friend (I love salt, and I have POTs, so I need it, technically). All in all, the restaurant was very star-wars coded, which delighted me, because I am Jar Jar Binks. It was also close to the outsider art museum, which made things feel very seamless. It was not the perfect French meal, but it was super-cool and super-good and super-unique, so I was super-happy!
Instead of spending $80 at Crazy Horse, we went to Au Lapin Agile after dinner, located in the same neighborhood. It’s a historical $25 cabaret, frequented by Picasso. I decided after visiting the Picasso museum a few days earlier that I was obsessed with him. So I was very happy to be where he was, on my birthday. I’d also like to be important. So it feels good to do things that important people did.
My 28th Birthday, this June, in NYC
I think that this year, I wanted to feel seen and understood and acknowledged, mostly by myself. I want to be and feel important in my lifetime.
Over the last two years, I’ve processed the weird stinging shift of best-friends marrying off, having babies, and building a world where I am not very important. Because I don’t know anyone who I’d marry, and I don’t know if I want babies, I have to build an entirely different type-world. Which is what I’m doing.
I want to be and feel whole, entirely on my own.
I tell myself that I am important because I’m destigmatizing sobriety and bipolar on the internet, and that I am simultaneously a very put-together, well-educated, classy young lady. I sometimes think that I am all of these things solely because I want to be important, and not because it’s natural for me. But doing so feels like an accomplishment either way, and it makes me feel good about myself. Like I’m balancing my karmic scales, like I may get a reward for my altruism, like I deserve a spotlight, because I’m performing as much for the greater good as I am to be told that I’m doing great, and that I am Good.
So I turned 28, which is inching towards 30, and I am feeling weird about how people younger than me have more advancement towards the kind of life I want, like they got a head-start or something.
And I finally went to see the ballet on my birthday. Swan Lake opened on the 17th, which is my actual birthday day, A Wednesday. I finally used the credit-card points that I’ve been stockpiling since-ever, and booked myself a one-night stay at The Plaza, so I could wake up on my birthday in a beautiful hotel room, and get ready for the matinee performance. I checked in on the eve of my birthday and was treated by the front desk like I was any other random bitch (I have stayed at less prestigious hotels and been treated better, but I mostly wanted to hide away in my room anyway, not feel buttered by the tired hotel employees). I ordered expensive room service and rented the Robert-Redford Great Gatsby while eating a burger that had the plaza logo charred onto the bun. The burger wasn’t even that great, relatively speaking, but I felt very grateful looking at the logo-bun. And I felt my best while I sat in the beautiful tub, blasting a rom-com type playlist I threw together on my laptop. The bathroom was beautiful like a thoughtful woman is in her 40s who takes care of her looks and only keeps nice things. I sat in there for hours til the bubbles completely dissipated. I drew on The Plaza’s stationary, which made me feel like a super-important artist. I wrote in my manifestation journal about how much I’d like to be a super-important artist. It felt like my birthday before I even opened my eyes on the day-of. Similar to the park-hang, I felt like I could spend any birthday in a beautiful hotel bathroom, soaking in a tub for hours, and be absolutely content.
On my actual birthday this year, I woke up nervous to go to the ballet by myself. I wasn’t going to see anyone I knew for another half-day. I went and got myself a croissant and walked through central park, and then I got myself another, to compare. The second one was better.
I ate it while I wrote in my manifestation journal, and I watched mini-sailboats race in the pond while birds pecked at the croissant crumbs by my feet. It got hot, and I was excited to see my parents later. If you noticed, I haven’t spent a birthday with them in a long time. For a few reasons. But I am happy this year to spend my birthday with them, because it is kind of their birthday too.
And I was alone on our birthday feeling especially young and naive, I was shy in my beautiful dress and my heels felt hard to walk in on the slippery hotel room carpet. I felt a bit in-over-my-head for thinking I would float around on a cloud. But I did, because I was offered a ride to the ballet in The Plaza Hotel’s Maybach, and the driver told me about the Sikhs he normally drives and the luxury cruise lines he used to work on. He shows me pictures of his daughters, and I am less nervous. People are people, even if they are fancy-adjacent, or fancy-themselves, and I belong on earth, and in rooms, and in cars. I write that in my manifestation journal when I get home. The carpet at Lincoln Center was not slippery, and I am sitting next to a 6 year old in a pink tutu-dress. The ballet was pretty. There were also old ladies there, and. they didn’t seem lame or boring. Kind of the opposite.
My best-friend from Philly met me infront of Lincoln Center with a bouquet of flowers. She said she was having fun walking around and pretending to be a New Yorker, which felt like a gift, because she usually talks about how much she hates New York. I was glad she did not buy a ticket to the ballet, because she would not have liked it. I know this because I know her, and I know that I would have been sad to be doing something I find enjoyable, next to somebody not enjoying themselves. We enjoyed a walk through Central Park, yapping and taking pictures and fixing our makeup on a park bench.
I had made a reservation at Bemelmens to listen to jazz in between the ballet and our 8 PM dinner res.
Bemelmens is a beautiful room located in the Carlyle Hotel, and I’ve gone on 2 weird dates there. One of the dates was not weird, it was actually very nice, but the whole situationship was kind of weird, which ruins the memory for me. I was really excited about showing my parents the beautiful hand-painted wallpaper, and rewriting the memory, and being treated to a nice time. I imagined myself as an important artist, important enough to be commissioned to make beautiful wallpaper. I think about how everyone who has ever been important has always been human, and how a lot of important people didn’t become important until they got older than I am right now. I was doing a lot of extremely intentional manifesting on my birthday.
I made a fuss about my birthday dinner reservation. I booked about 100 waitlist alerts on Resy and Opentable. I was very concerned about not feeling out of place, all dressed up in my best. I wanted a classic New York dining room, since I’d be with my parents and 2 of my close friends, and since I don’t in New York anymore. Minetta Tavern wouldn’t take me, and the slew of trendy uptown French spots only had the worst times available. So I called Elios, an Italian spot frequented by Upper East Siders. I hadn’t been, but I’d heard about it from my local Upper East Side party-friends in the years prior. It felt fitting. And it was.
The food was delicious, and the service was great, because it took 20 minutes to get us seated. Our table ended up being the best in the house, which is meaningful to me. The room was jovial and happy birthday songs were sung around the dining room several times during our meal. I also think that the vibe of a dining room is very important. I was very smug that my dinner-res psychosis worked out. The final point of manifesting that I’ll mention was the book covers hung on the wall at Elios. I wrote in my manifestation journal that I would like my book cover to hang on the wall. Though I’ll probably have to eat there a few more times first, and I’ll have to write a good book.
Ultimately, the point of all this (beyond sharing good birthday ideas) is that I want to convert even more people to self-centered living, and to really considering yourself and how you change year over year. I can’t say that I’ve ever been perfect, and I think that my birthday celebrations reflect a lot of my imperfections (or fatal flaws)
I remember how annoying it felt when my best friend actually listened to me when I told her to cut it out with people-pleasing. So many of her problems and complaints so obviously stemmed from that bad-habit of hers. The solution was so clear to Me (as it always is….) But I failed to understand that I was also one of the people benefitting from her people-pleasing habit. When she was initially started setting up her boundaries, it felt like she was building a fucking moat, and it was keeping me out. Once I adjusted to the new dynamic, I was more glad to have a friend who built a life around herself and subsequently invited me in, rather than a friend who built a life around everyone else, so much so that she didn’t have a little kingdom of her own.
When I’m boasting about my birthdays and how self-centered I am, I’m mostly just being cheeky about intentionality and refining your taste. I don’t think one facet of culture or one perspective on taste is right or wrong, I just think it’s important to have one.
I like strong people. And I don’t mind helping make people stronger. I think I am more empathetic than I’d prefer, because I know how desperately I’ve always wanted an older sister/mentor/easy and good life. I want everyone on my team to show up whole on their own, or at least to show up with the desire to be the best they can be. Like I said before: It makes me better, to be surrounded by people like that. Which is another nod to my self-centeredness.
I want everyone to be self-centered, to have great birthdays, and I want them to invite me, because I like enjoying myself, and I like watching other people enjoy themselves.
