Today is my birthday! – Are Birthday Wishes a Good Thing?

 Today is my birthday! I am incredibly grateful for all the beautiful wishes I have already received and (without getting ahead of myself) for any that some of you may still send my way! 🙂  I'm grateful that another beautiful year is behind us, and we get to celebrate it with the ones I love—including you lovely folks who have joined my virtual family here on my blog. Whatever your status, whether you are a regular reader or just found my blog, I want to express my gratitude to everyone. I also want to thank you for visiting and hope you continue to see 🛂 ❤

For kids, especially, celebrating a birthday is a special occasion. As kids, we usually look forward to our birthdays as a time when things will improve, and we often fantasize about obtaining spectacular presents or accomplishing incredible things. However, as we grow older, birthdays lose their importance. Many adults dread or hardly celebrate their special day, seeing it as a symbol of yet another year of maturing and a diminishing youth. When it's our birthday, though, how should we feel? Would you like us to send birthday wishes, too?

Childish hopes and wishes

Like many other kids, when I was a kid, my birthday meant a party. For some reason, I didn't always have many people over to celebrate my birthday or come over to visit. But I always loved getting cards and gifts and being happy that I was a year older. In a child's mind, a birthday is about getting more prominent, which is seen as enjoyable. When it was time to blow out the candles on my cake, it was the best part of my celebration. The cake was also essential to me because it had a growing number of candles that showed my age and let me make a wish for something special.

Many of us make a wish and then blow out the candles. As a child, I loved doing this because I could fantasize about all the silly things I wanted to get, like a new toy, book, or device!   As the years passed by, my dreams grew and changed. In my teens, I started to wish for different things. I had a hard time as a kid. I was bullied a lot at school, and teachers didn't do much to help me with that or my health (I have mental depression and a long-term illness), which made every day at school hard. When I blew out the candles, a computer game occasionally appeared in my dreams, but the majority of the time, I prayed for things like receiving love from the girls or teachers at high school, avoiding bullying, or becoming good at something (I felt like I wasn't good at anything at the time).

Dreams as an adult?

It got more challenging for me to enjoy my birthdays as I physically grew up (even though I still felt very young inside) and as an adult. I felt like such a failure because I didn't have a direction to go with my life at college or a career I was interested in. I experienced both a good and a bad time on my birthday. As always, I celebrated the day and made it a point to do something fun for myself, like watching a favorite movie or drama. However, I was unable to conceal the overwhelming sadness I felt on that day, and I would always wish I could find direction or stop being depressed.

After a while, I stopped wishing a lot because it was hard to imagine and think about what I wanted. This made it challenging for me to expect things on my birthday. I knew my depression had a role to play, but I couldn't dream of anything I wanted while I was that depressed. And when it was time to blow out the candles, I took longer to imagine what I wanted. I let the candles burn, and the wax melted all over the cake while I came up with a single wish. It wasn't as much fun as when I was a kid.

A Big change in direction

In the past few years, a lot of traumatic experiences have happened to me, and my health was one of them. A few years ago, my health was at its worst. I was having trouble because I couldn't breathe. It's too lengthy for this post, but feel free to leave a comment if you'd like to read about my experiences with it. Once the bad feelings from the incident passed away, I started looking at life more positively. Soon after, I began to feel much better about life and enjoyed plans and wishes for it again.

As time moved on, I started to remember my birthdays in the same way I do now. I began to make tiny wishes in life. For my birthday, I assumed it was something more accessible that I knew was likely to come true, like not having to cry for a day or being able to breathe better, etc. I wouldn't wish for big or perfect things, even though I know deep down that I'm a perfectionist. Instead, I hope and wish for small things to get better. That way, I knew it might come true later in the year. On my next birthday, I wanted to get something that I was already planning to get myself. Still, I also wanted to feel the joy of making a wish and knowing it would come true again. Thinking that my wish would come true made me feel better and kept me in a more positive frame of mind.

Wishes do come true on birthdays!

Since I was a teenager, I've always wanted to be liked and accepted for who I am and to find something I'm good at and love doing. I wanted a job that let me do what I loved, and I knew deep down that I loved talking (when I wasn't shy) and helping people. A part of me wishes to use my talent to make people happy. I didn't want anything else except for my life's work to be something I love and that helps other people. I know it seems like an odd wish. It was the only thing to help me find my way and stop feeling lost. It was strange that it took me so long to realize it, but blogging started to give me an awareness of the objective. The more time I spent writing about different things on my blog and trying to stay happy and cheerful, the more comfortable and positive I became, and I felt like it gave me the sense of purpose I'd always wanted. For the first time in years, blogging has helped me feel like I'm part of a community. I've also met some great people that I never would have met if I hadn't started blogging. I'm happy with my life now that I blog, and I feel like I'm helping other people (even if all I'm doing is pointing them toward the best topic to read). Who knows, maybe I'm entertaining them with my blog or random thoughts? I feel better than I ever have. It's a strange feeling, but I feel like the veil of depression I've been under for years is finally lifting. I don't know if blogging or other things I've done to stay cheerful have helped. While I have bad days, I'm genuinely happy with my life. In some ways, I remember the birthday wish I made all those years ago: to find my meaning and do something I love. As I write more, I feel like they're being answered. 

It's true that writing blogs and talking about things I love. It helps me feel better and makes me better at doing things in real life as well. 

There's hardly anything I look forward to about my birthday, even though I'm a little older than I wanted to be when I had my whole life believed out (or beginning to get sorted out). There's still a long way to go!) I feel good about my life now because it's my birthday, which means another year to wish for something good to happen. It's not the new year that excites me; it's my birthday because I know I am looking forward to something good. If it doesn't happen this year, I'll add it up to a dream or wish that will come true in a few more years, like my teenage ones did!

I hope you all have a good day, and I can express my love and positivity to you. I also wish you a beautiful and special day! ♥ 😀