I don’t celebrate my birthday anymore.
Birthdays used to be charming. Predictable. That manufactured joy people mistake for ritual. Candles, cake, the socially mandated chorus of people singing at you while you pretend not to feel awkward. Back then, it was just a marker. Another loop around the sun. Another notch on the linear narrative of becoming older and supposedly wiser.
Then I got cancer. Not the kind you can hashtag or tuck neatly into a “fighter” narrative. Metastatic. The word itself has too many consonants to say softly. It spreads. It eats. It whispers in your lymph nodes that the story might not end with wisdom. It might just end.
That was three years ago.
Now, every October, I don’t celebrate aging. I count the distance between me and the edge I didn’t fall over. I measure time not in candles, but in margins—how far I’ve pulled away from the cliff that once defined my days. This is not a “gratitude” post. I am not one of those people who claims cancer was the best thing that ever happened to them. It wasn’t. It was theft, dressed in cellular mutation. It stole energy, it stole time, and for a while, it stole the version of me that could make a plan without hearing the shadowy footnote: if I’m still here.
But here I am. And I am three.
Three years old in this second life, this after-life that began not with death but with the decision to stay.
When people talk about survival, they talk about strength. But survival isn’t strength. It’s strangeness. You become a stranger to the world you once belonged to. Everyone else is still playing a game called forever, and you’ve been kicked into a parallel round called borrowed. Everything is heightened and flattened at the same time. Ordinary moments buzz with electric beauty. And yet, you find yourself unable to tolerate small talk or superficiality. You want to scream in the middle of dinner parties: Do you know how temporary you are?
This third birthday isn’t about cake. It’s about claiming space in a world I once prepared to exit. It’s about doing things that feel absurdly alive: starting companies, throwing parties, writing books, loving too much, laughing too hard, not waiting. It’s about skipping the performance of modesty and calling myself what I am: a genius, a builder, a legend who outran something most people don’t.
I’m not better now. I’m different. Before cancer, I was impressive. After cancer, I became impossible to ignore. I didn’t go back to who I was. I burned that person down and built something sharper. Faster. Hungrier. Alive in the marrow, not just the calendar.
So no, I don’t celebrate my birthday. I weaponize it.
Because every year I stay alive, the world has to deal with the fact that I’m still here—thinking, creating, rewriting every rule that told me to stay small or grateful or soft.
Three. That’s toddler age. But I’m not toddling. I’m running.
And I don’t plan to stop.