I recently had a birthday. (No, I’m not going to tell you the exact date.) It was fine. I spent it celebrating someone else’s birthday (long story).

I used to hate my birthday, to the point that I would post a message like this on Facebook:

Listen up, because I’m only going to say this once.

My birthday is tomorrow. I’ve hidden the date from Facebook, but some of you know it, and I think FB will ignore my request and tell everyone about it.

Fine. Whatever.

Please do not observe it here on Facebook. Don’t send me messages, don’t post status updates or photos, don’t tag me in birthday things you post on your own pages.

If you really, truly feel you need to do something, you can make a small donation to Trans Lifeline (translifeline.org) and not post on Facebook (or anywhere else) that you did so. You don’t have to tell me you did, either.

I don’t make this request lightly or frivolously. My birthday is a difficult time for my mental health, and Facebook notifications only make it worse. I don’t know why this happens; I only know that it does.

So please, help me out here. I’d really appreciate it.

In the past five years or so I’ve mellowed out a bit when it comes to birthdays. I even let people tell me happy birthday without losing my shit.

I tried (and failed) to find a blog post I wrote about 15 or so years ago where I talked about why I didn’t like my birthday. Part of it was the lack of effort people needed to put in anymore, in the era of Facebook. I remember getting the same message three years in a row from a work friend: “Happy birthday, chief.” Same punctuation, same capitalization, even around the same time of day. He and I never exchanged Facebook messages other than when he sent me birthday greetings, so I would see a list of birthday greetings every year and it just made me upset.

I think another part of it was that my first wife’s birthday was ten days after mine and she was impossible to please. My birthday meant the start of a countdown to me somehow disappointing her. Whatever I did, it had to be romantic, and it had to be a surprise. I couldn’t just tell her “hey, I got us tickets to see [artist she likes]”; I had to finagle a surprise out of it, which made it more difficult because the more people you have in on a surprise the harder it is to surprise the person in question. Toward the end I just gave up and got her a nice gift. It wasn’t romantic, and it wasn’t a surprise. It was nice, and it was something she wanted, but it was never quite good enough.

Nowadays the only thing I have to do regarding my ex-wife’s birthday is remind my kid to get her a birthday card and urge her to buy/make a gift for her mother. And as far as my partners go, they know that I am giving them a gift that is thoughtful, sometimes funny, sometimes romantic, sometimes delicious. They don’t require it to be a surprise; if, for example, I wanted to take one of my partners out for her birthday, I would just say something like, “let’s go to [restaurant X] for your birthday, and then go see [artist Y].”

So yeah. My birthday was fine. And if you want to do something to commemorate it, Trans Lifeline can always use your donations.