Last Monday was my 19th birthday (thanks for the belated birthday wishes, friends)! Contrary to popular belief, I hate my birthday.

Normally, I’m not one to shy away from the attention. I can take complements and know my self-love can be taken as being conceited by some. Anyway, there’s still something really weird to me about celebrating the day of my birth. It’s not like I’ve had a history of bad birthdays, although there are definitely some years that I could do with forgetting about.

Maybe I’m overthinking this whole thing, but birthdays are just so damn awkward to me. Like, everyone feels entitled to be nice to you, to make your day feel special because you’re one year older. People who you haven’t talked to in years post on your Facebook wall saying how happy they are that you’ve survived another year of life. Or those stupid Instagram collage posts from your friends filled with your ugly-faced Snapchats complete with an essay on why you’re the best person in the whole wide world. You get texts from people whose number you’ve deleted because of some series of unfortunate events, and you have to act like you remember them and thank them so much for them being in your life.

But you know what really irks me? The fact that I’m forced to celebrate it. That to show the world that I’m thankful for living another year, I have to do some crazy things like get a tattoo, get completely shitfaced, or at least go out for dinner. No, screw that. All I did this year for my birthday was sleep, eat McDonald’s, and watch Netflix. And guess what? It was freaking fantastic. Why can’t it be socially acceptable to spend my “special” day indoors and not talk to anyone the whole damn day?

Let’s go back to bad birthday years. I think it happened when I was in the fifth grade and I was so excited for my birthday because we were having a tea party! I was so damn proud of everything: The decorations, the tea cups that were from England, and the stupid tea sandwiches that were so delicately cut into tiny bite sizes. We were down to the wire, about an hour before all my friends were about to arrive. But guess what? All those peasants canceled on me. Little ten-year-old me had her world shattered around her. It was a crazy domino effect. One friend couldn’t go because of family issues, someone else couldn’t go because the other friend couldn’t go, and so forth. That was the day I decided the whole world was really shitty and people are terrible.

Just kidding, I was born into the world a mad, angry child.