Today is my birthday.

I wrote something last week about birthdays, about how I never know how to feel about them. Well, this morning I’ve been crying - real, fat tears, for the first time in weeks or months - because it’s my birthday, and I’m in pain.

At the moment, I’m dealing with some health-related stuff. I’ve got injuries that don’t seem to be healing and a complete inability to sleep for longer than a couple of hours at a time. I’m exhausted. I feel weak, broken, ugly.

I like to spend my birthdays alone. Every year, I feel like I shouldn’t care about the day. Most people I know believe this is the Mature Thing To Do. They either don’t care about their birthday or they pretend not to. It’s what healthy adults do, right?

But I do care. Like the other annual events of some significance - Christmas, New Year’s, Ramadan - birthdays get me sentimental. I like to reflect, think back on the past year. This last year has been a real doozy. It’s good to remember what I’ve survived and achieved, alongside the hardships.

So I like to be alone on my birthday. It’s the only way I can be with myself and my thoughts and my memories without any of it being absorbed or co-opted or influenced by anyone else. It’s the only way I don’t need to absorb anyone else’s feelings, too. I can just be, and I’ve got a socially acceptable excuse for it.

And this morning, I’ve been crying because I am alone and I feel helpless. I’m in charge of my own health, and nothing I’m doing seems to be healing me. I’m tired but I can’t rest. I’m crying because it never gets any easier.

Two of my favourite songs are titled after ages, the ages I’ve been the last two years. Those songs have been like beacons to me. Something meaningful, some kind of map, leading up to each age - and then guidance, a rock to stand on while the year passed. Today, I’ve got no songs left. I’ve got no beacon.

I’ve looked to others for help and guidance but I don’t know how to do it right, so it rarely helps. It makes me more melancholy, more afraid, and this last year, I’ve learned the necessity of being alone. Not just physically alone, which comes naturally to me, which is usually comforting to me - but alone with myself. Alone without judgement. Alone with my deepest fears. Alone and taking care of myself.

In last week’s draft, I wrote about the library I used to go to when I was growing up. We moved back to London, finally, when I was around twelve, nearly thirteen. We stayed in that flat longer than anywhere else I’d grown up in. I was there until I was nineteen. Those years were the hardest of my life.

I went to the library early on. It wasn’t my first library, of course, but it was the first one I went to of my own volition. I still remember filling out the form for a library card. It was all my own decision and felt weightier because of it. It felt lighter too. It felt like freedom.

I practically lived in the fantasy and sci-fi section at that shitty library. Three or four shelves packed in the corner. I’d sit on the thin and fuzzy carpet and pick out whole series. Any trilogy that was complete, anything with a cool cover or a vaguely interesting blurb. Anything that allowed me to escape.

Those books and that library gave me somewhere to go when my real life was unsafe and uncertain. The books I read inspired me to create my own worlds and characters, and I had another escape. This was how I took care of myself back then, when looking for help was unreliable and disappointing. This was just for me, for a little while.

After I’ve written this and sent it out, I’m going to visit some man-made caves not far from London. I was going to go on a long walk but I think the pain might rule that out, so instead I’m going to find somewhere that does nice tea. I might go to my ends in north London because when I can’t get hundreds of miles away for my birthday, I like to get as close to the pangs of nostalgia and sorrow as possible.

Beyond that, I don’t know. I imagine next year, I’ll be looking back on another motley of achievements and sadnesses. I know it won’t get any easier. I won’t feel any stronger. I won’t be any less alone, and I won’t have songs that feel like stepping stones. But I will have myself, and maybe the pain, and maybe the tears. Maybe I’ll know how to cope better, maybe being alone will make more sense, or maybe not. I’ll still find a way to take care of myself.

Heavy Machinery is written by Zainabb Hull and powered by my broken body and tea.
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