You're listening to Life Kit, from NPR.

Hey everybody, it's Mariel.

So I, uh, I heard you got a birthday coming up.

Yeah, you?

If you're listening to this, that means you have a birthday coming up eventually.

Oh, not a birthday person.

Life will do that to you.

A lot of times, you know, we're open and excited about our birthday as children,

and then we get messages typically from the adults around us that we're not actually that special,

our birthday isn't that special, or sad things happen on our birthday.

We don't get what we want, we just shut down.

Tamara Hurwitz Fleming has thought a lot about this.

She's an author, artist, and birthday enthusiast,

and she wrote a book called How to Have a Happy Birthday.

She says birthdays can come with a lot of expectations and pressure.

Maybe you have an idea, articulated or not, of how the day is supposed to go and when that doesn't happen.

We shut down and we push it away and then we get depressed as the day comes.

It's like a wave is coming and it's just going to knock us down.

Also she says no one teaches you how to have a birthday as an adult,

or what it's supposed to mean.

When we're kids and our family celebrates our birthday

and does it for us, we just grow up thinking that that's how it's done.

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