Around this time of year, a steady and irrational fear starts slowly mounting inside of me….the “unlucky” 13th is coming around the corner.

To provide some context, I was always painfully shy as a child… so shy that I would lock myself in my bedroom as my brother and his friends would play video games in the living room.  I would only dash out of my room to use the restroom, in hopes that they wouldn’t see me.

I was scared and anxious of being the center of attention.  For instance, I quit ballet (a hobby that I genuinely enjoyed and loved) during my grade school years, entirely because my ballet instructor made me dance in the front for one of our dance recitals.

Photo evidence:

(I’m so over it…)

So you can see why I’d be traumatized by birthdays.

One of my most vividly horrifying memories was in fourth grade in Mr. Hubbard’s class (R.I.P. to one of my favorite teachers of all time). He was a very sweet, dear old man who liked to shower us with attention on our birthdays.  For my birthday, he decided to carry me in my chair above his head (Jewish wedding Hora style), while everyone gawked and sang happy birthday to me.  I was mortified.

Another time in high school, my best friends decided to make a huge birthday banner for me and put up in our central quad. I was so embarrassed, I refused to eat in the quad.  My friends were upset at what an ingrate I was (they spent hours making the poster), and we got in a fight which ended up with me in tears.

Luckily for me, since high school, my best friend just happened to have her birthday only a few days after mine.  So whenever we celebrated, it would be a joint festivity rather than a day just for me.  Not only that, but for some reason there just seems to be a lot of birthdays in my birthday week (March babies are the best babies).

The concept of birthdays is still strange to me.  We’re celebrating when you were born? Shouldn’t we be celebrating mothers this day instead? You didn’t do anything spectacular to be born… it wasn’t even of your own volition! Mother’s day should be their child’s (or children’s) birthday(s). According to this dubious site, some villages/countries in Asia and Africa don’t celebrate birthdays.  If it was up to me, we would celebrate certain milestones, but an annual thing just seems excessive.