Birthday Blues: Part 2 (22nd, 23rd, 24th)

PhruityPheebles
Aug 8, 2021
11 min read

Updated: Sep 8, 2023

Recommended for people 21+

Content and Trigger Warning: Language & Profanity; Drug or alcohol use; Drug or alcohol abuse; mental health triggers like social isolation, anti-social behavior, symptoms of depression; social anxiety, panic attacks, emotional or mental abuse, gaslighting, manipulation; narcissistic abuse, fat shaming, fatphobia, graphic depictions of consensual sex; cheating partners

Following my failed 21st birthday party (see Part 1), I had pretty much given up on the concept of celebrating my birthday with other people. I had lowered my expectations down to the floor. I was tired of being let down by people I cared about, hoping they would want to celebrate my birthday or even remember it, for fuck's sake.

>>> My 22nd Birthday

Because my 21st birthday ended up being such a disaster, I didn't plan on doing anything by the time my 22nd birthday came around. However, I did have better friends this time around; one, in particular, was a friend I had met in an English class the year before, right before my 21st. We discovered that their birthday was the day before mine, but we had just become friends, so we did not end up celebrating together.

Usually, they liked to go back home to celebrate with family since they lived closer to our college. However, for our 22nd birthday, we shared midnight. So we went out to a taco & margarita place downtown and drank and ate tacos until midnight, their parents even visited and partied with us, and their new partner had also joined. Unfortunately, upon waking up hours later, I realized I had lost my license when we went out to the bar the night before. (Curse my ADHD!) So the only thing I had planned on doing was going to the DMV to get a new one.

At the time, I was starting to party a lot with my co-workers from Chipotle. Four of the guys I worked with were all friends who lived together, so their place became the hot spot once we got off work, usually around 11 pm. Instead of going to the bars every weekend, we would all get off work, go home to shower and change, and figure out a way to get to their place, which was on the south side of town quite-aways from the campus.

Since school started in August, we partied pretty much every single weekend because all of us usually worked pretty much every single weekend. One of the guys from work was someone I spent the most time helping on the closing shift, and I also coincidentally had a massive crush on him. This was my first crush on any guy in a very long time. We only spent time together at work or hanging out with our friends at his place, which was usually a Sausage Fest.

I wanted more one-on-one time with him so we could hang and talk since I thought we had quite a bit in common. The only time we got to speak alone was when he would close the front line at Chipotle, and I was usually the last short shifter left that would cover the line when people came through so that he could focus on closing tasks. We had so much fucking fun during those shifts, but most importantly, we could still get our shit done so we could get out at a decent time. Sometimes I offered managers to stay and close to get the extra hours I really needed.

He had been telling me that he needed to get a Missouri license. (We were both originally from Illinois, and it's super easy to establish residency in MO, and most out-of-state college students would do this to get cheaper in-state tuition rates.) I told him that I lost my ID coincidentally, and if I wanted to celebrate my birthday to get any form of alcohol, I would need to get a new license.

So I spent my birthday getting a new license with my crush. We headed back to his apartment, the "Hot Spot," and just hung out and chatted with his other roommates. And that's pretty much all I did for my 22nd birthday. He was the one who actually ended up finding my original MO license over six months later... It was tucked deep under the driver's seat of my car. Super cool, right? No! I think this began a curse on my birthday. The curse was this crush.

To make a long story short: I eventually told this guy how I felt a couple of months later, and he friend-zoned me. While disappointed, this helped me get over my little crush, but we inevitably did end up spending a lot of one-on-one time together. Then, about another six months later, he ended up telling me he liked me. Of course, it was all a façade, though. He couldn't like me; I was too fat for his liking, and if I wasn't, who knows, maybe he would have felt the chemistry we had a little sooner instead of friend-zoning me the first time around.

But instead what happened, was he decided to lead me on, so we dated for a few weeks before he broke it off with me (and fucked my roommate behind my back while the three of us would hang out like we were all great pals!) See my blog, Lost for more of the details there if you're curious. So here comes the messy birthday year.

>>> My 23rd Birthday

When he broke up with me, I took it pretty rough. After several risky behaviors, I realized later that I might have been experiencing episodes of mania. I wouldn't realize until later, and I wouldn't get diagnosed until much later. I wrote it off at the time as a broke

n heart. After he broke up with me, I realized that I was utterly in love with him despite everything he did to hurt me. Later I realized that it was more than just a broken heart, but a bruised and damaged ego. So when I got a tattoo on my back the day before my 23rd birthday, I just chalked it up to "going through something" with the money I didn't have. I like to call it instead of an early quarter-life crisis a "Jordan Crisis" because I did not, in fact, have a good "Michael Jordan" year.

My roommate- you know- the one who had been hiding the fact that she slept with my "ex,"... helped throw me a birthday party at a popular bar downtown. I confessed to her about my 21st birthday disaster and how I never had a party where I went out clubbing with friends. She pulled out all the stops by helping me do my make-up, taking pictures of me (with my new tattoo to show it off to people), and getting me a pink sash that said "Birthday Girl" with blinking lights. She invited some friends from my job at Chipotle and even asked my "ex," who was trying to become friends with me again.

Me the night of my 23rd- I'm pretty intoxicated here.

During our time at the bar, my friend ran into her ex and the guy she liked, both of whom were friends in an extra-curricular activity together. It would be safe to assume that all of her attention revolved around who she was bringing home that night. My "ex" disappeared sometime deep into the evening after we had all gotten significantly drunk. I was worried about him, but not in the same way I would be concerned about a woman being drunk by herself. I was just concerned because we couldn't find him anywhere even after I had texted him.

My roommate had informed me that she saw a girl approach him intensely, and they went off somewhere. I lost my shit; I had recognized his ex at the bar earlier that night. At this point, it had been well over a year since they broke up because they had a lot of issues. She absolutely sucked, but you know what, he let her suck- he enabled her to suck. My roommate ended up trying to reach out via text as well since it had been close to two hours without anyone hearing from him. Most of the night was such a blur because I was so cross-faded, but I remember him eventually coming back well after midnight, and I remember being so annoyed and pissed that my roommate had called us an Uber, and we went back to our place.

I immediately went to the bathroom to piss, and she followed me in. We only had one bathroom, so we frequently used it simultaneously. I pissed while she fixed her make-up. While pissing, I was cursing and swearing and angrily ranting about him doing that tonight of all nights. He ended up coming back to my apartment to collect his things with our other friends, who left for the night after dropping him off. He knew that we always left our door unlocked, so he came right in while I was cussing him out with our bathroom door wide open. He convinced me to let him talk about what had happened. We ended up talking outside in front of my apartment while my roommate invited her new guy of the week over to our place.

He apologized profusely, saying that he didn't mean to ruin anything; he was just caught off guard by his ex being there. Okay. He had plenty of chances to talk to her, but he chose the wrong time and place. I learned that he had walked her home from the bar, which was why he was gone for so long. He ended up telling my roommate more about what happened than he did with me. But during our talk, he had ensured me that he was looking forward to bonding with me again.

And we did "bond" again, eventually. Another long story short as previously mentioned, he told me he had slept with my roommate and loved me but finally confessed that he wasn't as attracted to me because I was overweight, a triple whammy said all in one night. Again, see "Lost" for the story deets. This was in the fall of 2019, and things between us got challenging and mainly confusing because I think that he was attracted to me, that he did love me, but he projected his insecurities onto my body. Not cool, man, sort your shit out.

He never could, but he did keep on insisting we be friends when he came back to campus after winter break in 2020. We tried to become friends again, hanging out here and there. I got my diagnosis for my bipolar disorder in February of 2020. In March of 2020, the pandemic happened. He left campus and ceased talking to me just when we started working on our friendship again.

>>> My 24th Birthday

It wasn't until classes "resumed" in the fall that he reached out to me. He seemed apologetic. I thought he might have been putting all that time to good use, sorting his feelings out, or figuring his shit out but nah. He told me that he missed me, and we began to hang out and talk again. But after every conversation, he would say something or do something that would be considered quite controversial if you say you're just platonic friends with someone. By the time my 24th birthday came around, he was the only one in my life- besides my family- that seemed to remember it. Unfortunately, given my track record, that was big for me.

Me at 24, first birthday during the Pandemic.

My parents had visited me the weekend of my birthday; it was on a Saturday. After a sushi dinner with them and my (new) roommate, they returned to the hotel. He came over with weed blunts he wrapped for us and this margarita wine that we discovered during a trip to Texas that Gets-You-Fucked-Up-And-Fast. Naturally, we both got fucked up and started to listen to music.

Things got awkward when he asked me if I wanted to dance. Maybe it's just me, but if I want to dance, I certainly don't ask permission; I just fucking dance. So I interpreted that he was asking me to dance. The crazy thing was, he didn't stop me; he didn't backtrack or correct himself. For God's sake, the guy put on a slow song. How the hell was I supposed to interpret that?? He took my outstretched hand and pulled me in, and we sort of slow danced/slow hugged.

It got intense; we stood there for a long while hugging tightly, embracing while swaying to the rhythm of the music. It had gotten so intense that he pulled away. The moments after he pulled away, he said so many controversial, contradictory things. Notably: "I thought you were trying to kiss me when you looked up at me," I told him that he was the one who put his hand on my neck... but God, sorry that the idea of kissing me freaks you out, even when you already have. Sounds like a personal problem.

"I just don't understand; every time I get fucked up, I just want to touch you and be close to you.." Like how the fuck am I supposed to respond to that? So I just asked, does this mean you do or don't like me?

He said no, he still doesn't. It felt like he was rejecting me and breaking my heart all over again. The wound was still fresh, and the fucking loneliness and dread of the pandemic certainly didn't allow anything to heal over time. It was as if he had once again stuck a poisonous knife into that same open wound that he had left earlier. I told him to leave and I didn't get any sleep that night.

I woke up to see my parents off in the morning, and they could sense that something was wrong. At the time, I felt embarrassed and not that shocked about what transpired. I was mainly ashamed because I could see firsthand how manipulative and toxic he truly was this time around. I could never before because I was soo in love with him. Seeing it now made me realize that I no longer had those feelings. I could barely even recognize him anymore because I just saw him as this awful person, and he was going to keep hurting me in this way because he thought he could. It even made me wonder if he was always this shitty of a person. I think maybe yes.

However, this did teach me an important lesson: no matter how mentally ill someone is, it is not an excuse for the harm they cause. Poor mental health is not an excuse to be shitty. Bad people are mentally ill too. Especially when they can't take any accountability for it, he wanted to talk almost right away; I think he even phrased it as wanting to talk about "us." Ugh. There was no us.

There was always just him, doing what he wanted. I told him I needed some time. It was getting harder and harder for me to sort through my emotions. After about a week, we met up, and he still refused to take any accountability for our damaged relationship. He told me he still wanted to be friends, and I kept trying to make him understand that we hadn't been friends in a very long time. To me, he was an ex, and he acted that way. I told him that there was no way we could be friends anymore.

He didn't like that. Aside from blaming me for the choices HE made that hurt me, he insisted that we could and tried to convince me we could; we just "needed to hang out sober." I told him finally, something that was so hard for me to admit to myself: "I don't think I want to be friends with you." Why would I? Why would I be friends with someone who lied about loving me, made me feel less-than and consistently manipulated me into thinking he was into me. He seemed genuinely shocked I said it and tried to charm and convince and manipulate me into really trying again. I told him "sure" but wasn't feeling too hopeful.

We hung out once more, sober, with his brother and brother's girlfriend and I just felt strange about it. Soon after that, he stopped making any effort at all. I guess I was right; he was just too much of a coward to admit it. I pray to never waste another birthday on him again, but mostly I pray not to waste any more of my time with his mess ever again. Thank U, Next. Thank you for allowing me to see how shitty you genuinely are at your core.

Still haven't and want to read part 1: Birthday Blues at 21

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