I Regret Being Born
Have you ever thought about the fact that none of us actually asked to be born? For people who have no experiences with mental illnesses like mood disorders or personality disorders, the thought might be something they find baffling to even think about. Generally speaking, if you enjoy being alive and living your life, you probably don’t have all that many reasons to be thinking about how you never gave consent to being brought into this world: if you’re having a good time, something so fundamental and philosophical might be of no use for you to think about. “Yeah sure, I didn’t ask for this, but who cares about that, I’m glad I’m alive!”
Wishing that you were never born to begin with is often called passive suicidality. You don’t necessarily want to be dead, but instead you long for something completely out the realm of possibility: lack of existence. The thought of not having to experience anything, not the past, not the present, not the future, not the pain of dying, not the heartache of leaving your loved ones…it is a thought I remember having since I was 19 years old.
But there was a time when I truly enjoyed the fact that I got to wake up every morning and experience a new day. It is such a faded memory that I can’t really remember what the feeling actually felt like. What amazes me about it is how I was able to feel that genuine zest for life as a Kid, facing daily abuse and violence. How I was still excited to get out of bed and explore the world. I have come to the conclusion that a lot of it has to have something to do with the intense dissociation I was experiencing, as well as my inherent incapability to be aware of things in social situations. Neurodivergent brains are not always aware of the circumstances surrounding them, and therefore you might not be able to recognize abuse as abuse and trauma as trauma – until much later on in life. Then throw a shit ton of dissociation on top of that, and you’re cooked.
Thinking back on my childhood and my at-the-time perception of the situations that eventually traumatized me, I can pinpoint a few that I knew even back then that those events were not okay, and that they hurt me deeply. Funnily enough, there’s several of such happenings that are related to my birthday.
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Do you remember how important it was back in elementary school whether you were invited to a classmate’s birthday party or not? It spoke volumes of your status in the social hierarchy of the class: if someone didn’t invite you, that was them indicating to you that you were not worth their time, that you were not “cool enough” to come enjoy the delicious treats their mother had baked for their darling child and all the friends. It is such a universal experience that I feel not only justified but also emboldened in my expression of how badly this shit can damage your reputation in the group. And as we all know by now, bullying is an inherently social form of abuse.
As a Kid, I invited all of my Friends to my birthday party – twice. For me back then, it wasn’t because I wanted to seem cool or climb my way up the social latter, but because I genuinely wanted to show everyone that I was kind, friendly, pleasant, and someone they could all befriend without any fear of judgment. The more I think about my mindset, the sadder I feel, because in reality, whether I invited them or not, they couldn’t have cared less about how I perceived or treated them. I was not the one doing the judging, anyway.
My 11th birthday is one of the worst days I have ever experienced. It was a complete disaster; a day that left me and my mom in shock and devastation. It could have ended in a much more tragic way, that outcome was so close I still don’t know how I succeeded at preventing it from happening. And to think that all of this was just because I wanted to be genuine friends with my Friends, because I wanted to show them that just because I was a new face to them, it didn’t mean I only wanted to hang out with my then-best friend. So as a thank you, my Friends accepted my invitation, came to me and my mom’s tiny two-room apartment and caused such a ruckus that I ended up crying myself to sleep.
My birthday is a forever reminder of the way my kindness has been exploited only to cause me and my family even more suffering. It is an annual notification of the wastefulness of my existence in a world that I have never found a corner to nestle in comfortably. It is the culmination of the reasons why I regret the fact that I was ever born to begin with.
Because it just cannot be that the cost of me being alive is seeing the tears in my mother’s eyes and hearing the desperation in her screams when our precious furbaby got out the apartment door one of my Friends had deliberately left open when leaving. Living on the main road in the middle of the town, going outside for tiny Mew was a death sentence. And I had to run down the stairs to catch her before she reached the building door.
Nothing was ever good enough for them. It was not enough to make a mess in my room, it was not enough to bother my traumatized and afraid kitty by screaming at her, it was not enough to use my phone for making prank calls to the boys of the class, painting my lesbian ass as some cock-hungry bitch. No, they had to purposefully endanger my little sister’s safety, knowing damn well how much I loved that furbaby.
But they didn’t take off their scarf. They told me they were a bit cold, that’s why.
Of course, I thought. It’s the worst month to be born, after all.
The sun is shining,
ichigonya
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