This post discusses grief, bereavement, gender dysphoria and trans identity.

Birthdays are strange.

They are supposed to be happy. A celebration of life.

There is this expectation to feel grateful to be another year older, and sometimes I am, but birthdays feel more complicated to me.

Because birthdays aren’t just celebrations of the person you are, they are also reminders of the person you were, and the person you never got to be.

I think birthdays can be particularly strange when you’re trans, at least they are for me. There is something about being confronted with my age that makes me think about all the years attached to a version that never really felt like me.

There can be a strange distance between that person and this person.

I know that they are technically me.

I know that I lived those years, even if I can’t remember them.

But it feels like I am looking at somebody else’s childhood when I see the photographs. And then there is the maths of it all…

How old I am.

 How old I was when I realised who I was.

How old I was when I finally had the language for it.

How much time passed before I felt able to do anything about it.

How much of my life was spent trying to feel comfortable in a version of myself that was never going to fit.

How much of it feels wasted.

Birthdays can make those numbers feel very real.

There is a strange kind of grief in realising you can’t go back and give your younger self the life they deserved.

You can’t change the photographs.

You can’t rewrite the years.

You can’t give them the name they would have chosen or tell them that one day things will make more sense.

And I would be lying if I said I didn’t grieve that.

I think I find it particularly hard because I knew at such a young age but never felt safe enough to express it. And there is a constant voice in my head telling me that my life could have been so different if only I had felt safe.

And there is even more grief because people die.

That is perhaps one of the cruellest things about getting older.

Every birthday means another year has passed, and sometimes the people you desperately wish could have been there to see it are no longer here.

There are birthdays where you still expect a message from someone who will never send one.

There are people whose names you still look for when your phone lights up, or voices you can almost hear saying, “happy birthday!”

There are people who should have been sitting at the table and, instead, there is an empty chair.

And we are told that it eventually gets easier, but birthdays have a way of reminding us that time has not stopped simply because someone you loved died.

Another year without them.

You are older than the last time you saw them, and that feels unfair sometimes.

There is something particularly uncomfortable about celebrating your own existence when you are acutely aware of the people who no longer get to exist beside you.

My mum. My best friend. They are both gone.

I feel guilty that I am here and they are not.

But I am still here, and there is something strange about that.

The world kept moving. I kept moving with it.

Another year. Another birthday. Another version of me they will never get to meet.

Maybe that is the part I am trying to make peace with: that being here doesn’t mean I left them behind. It just means that, despite everything – despite the hurt, the pain, the countless times I could have given up – my life is still happening.

Still growing.

Still changing.

Still becoming.

And perhaps that is worth celebrating.