What are birthdays all about? How do you have a great one?
Some people get a bit down around their birthdays, fixating on where they feel they should be by now, and feeling like a failure for not reaching some ideal by a certain age. Others use birthdays as a way to overcompensate for feeling lonely, or not special enough, and demand that others shower them in gifts and attention (which, of course, does nothing to combat such feelings). Some take a stock approach to the day—their day is composed of generic things that everyone else does on their birthday, e.g., cake, balloons, a party, a fancy dinner, hyperbolic social media posts. Others tend to “ignore” their birthdays (but we all know you’re still thinking about it and wishing it was special, you dork) and pretend their birthdays don’t matter, performing some weird self-depreciating cycle that kind of bums everyone out.
This year I’m turning 30. I’m very much at peace in life, and so, so grateful to find myself in this position. And maybe it’s this peace, or maybe the nice round number of years I’m stacking up, but my birthday suddenly means something new to me. Instead of pretending it’s not really there, or expecting other people to make me feel good, or doing what I feel I should do, or measuring myself up to some marker, I’m designing a day full of experiences that symbolize my past and help me in my future. And doing absolutely nothing else outside of those things. I’m taking radical responsibility for meeting all of my needs and building myself up through consciously celebrating my unique life. Cutting out anything that isn’t meaningful, trimming the fat. Creating a yearly ritual, a ceremony to fuel me for another year.
A birthday is a time to celebrate your life to date, to examine how you’ve gotten better with time, and to prepare for a virtuous future. It’s a day of gratitude for the gift of being alive and of ritual preparation for the upcoming year of life. I designed this worksheet to help you think through what this actually means in practical terms.
The worksheet takes you through four categories of exercises:
- Examining the past year of your life
- Prompting you to think about your future
- Taking a birds-eye view of your entire life to date
- Forming themes from the answers to 1-3 above, and brainstorming concrete ideas for what to experience on your birthday to honor those themes.
What isn’t included in this worksheet is something that you’d need more space for than a worksheet allows—a mind map that’s best drawn on a separate piece of paper. Using the answers you came up with, mind-map specific events, sensations, gifts to yourself, and other experiences that you’d like to make part of your birthday.
Doing this, I noticed that flowers and music came up over and over again in my answers. So I’m definitely going to get my butt to my local florist and shamelessly indulge in the biggest, most obnoxious bouquet that catches my eye. And probably go to a nursery and buy myself yet another cactus. Food didn’t come up at all, so I’m going to skip any type of fancy dinner or dessert. Fitness is really important to what I want from my future, so I’m going to gift myself a nice, sweaty workout at the gym. And although I haven’t been out dancing at a bar in a very long time and don’t really care about it presently, I realized that doing such things was an important part of my past, so I’m going to get out there and dance my butt off with a nice fancy cocktail and the love of my life to celebrate the gift of having had years of colorful, vibrant experiences letting loose. It’s important to recreate the past sometimes to benefit from its radiance.
Download this worksheet and start your own process of brainstorming ideas for how to make your day special. Alternatively, if you’re planning a celebration for someone else, you could also complete this worksheet on their behalf to generate ideas for how you could surprise them and help make their birthday uniquely wonderful.
Have fun, let go of any expectations and “shoulds,” do weird and uniquely you things. Happy birthday.
The worksheet is available for free, although a small contribution to help cover the time we spend designing and developing these materials would be very appreciated!
- Please select an option below to download.
- If you choose the free option, our download manager will ask you to add the item to a cart, but don’t worry! You will not be charged to download it.
- If you choose to contribute, you will be directed to payment through PayPal, to an account that ends with @2lch.com—please don’t worry that it doesn’t say @thelucubrators.com, 2LCH is the design and development company that sponsors these worksheets!
- If you download the worksheet for free, and end up really liking it, feel free to come back again to re-download it with a contribution.