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Birthday Scaries and Surviving the Guilt of Loss

A little emotional and a lot of honesty. An ode to getting over cycles that have broken me over the years.

Lauren Mercedes

10/19/20264 min read

So I celebrated my birthday last week.

This may come as a surprise but that is a big sentence for me. This is the first birthday in over 10 years that I've actually properly celebrated. For many years I've spent the weeks running up to my birthday consumed by guilt that I'm still here while my Dad is not. He didn't die traumatically, he had Pancreatic Cancer, and due to complications from it he passed away when I was 14. This, of course, had a really big effect on how I carried myself and I will always have moments that I will struggle with. He held our family up, when he died I tried to step into that role, naturally at 14 I struggled with this and obviously I failed to fix the hole he left in our lives. I spent a lot of my life trying to be a replacement for him and this triggered an immense guilt that left me pretending it wasn't my birthday or being rocked with an overwhelming sadness causing me to go into what I call puddle mode.

I was fully living my life around becoming someone who could replace him and making decisions around what I thought he might have wanted for me, what I thought might make him proud, and who I felt I should be for my family. I sacrificed so much of who I actually was. I pursued Engineering over art. I made my whole world medical engineering in some sort of revenge arc gearing myself up to go into cancer research. I won an award with the IET for my work as an apprentice. Underneath it all I was lost, hurting, and honestly miserable. The toxic environment of the NHS burnt me out but the nagging feeling something wasn't right didn't leave me when I went into the private sector.

So I pivoted a bit and last year I changed jobs into software, something that wasn't webbed into my complex emotions, a remote job that gave me room to breathe. My new benefits package included a mandatory birthday day off. This didn't go down well for me on my last birthday and I spent my 25th fully puddled in a blanket cocoon. I realised I had to actually address this. Since my last birthday I've made some very big changes to my life and shifted my focus onto things that bring me joy rather than becoming someone for my Dad. I began building a life that is full.

I made a commitment to show up for myself at the gym and kickboxing.
I actively pursued making friends and building up the chosen family I always wanted.
I grasped the opportunity to start hosting book clubs and started sharing my collection out to people leading to some really wholesome moments with strangers and even exchanging letters.
I started Renastrate and while it isn't turning out like I pictured I'm really glad I put the energy in to things I love publically.

So on the approach to my birthday this year I resolved to treat it like a new year and redirect the guilt into what I want the next year of my life to look like. What do I want to see happen before I turn 27. How do I want to celebrate all I've achieved. I made the promise to myself months in advance and booked a girls spa break ahead of when the guilt normally kicks in so that I couldn't back out of breaking this cycle. I took myself out, went book shopping and treated myself to a gorgeous outfit from my favourite place for clothes. I didn't fight gifts or attempts anyone made to spend time with me. I also booked an appointment with my therapist on the day of just in case I needed that extra support. I didn't need it, I had truly kicked my birthday scaries to the curb, but we still had a good chat and she helped me see how big this was for me to push through it.

So what do I want 26 to look like? I thought about the things I loved most in this last year and that was making more art, rediscovering my love for books, and making more friends. This will be the core for my next year. I also faced up to the fact that I don't like content creation and making reels, I want to build Renastrate without that, leading to the decision to move to bullet journal style posts and attempting to grow the business side with real-world outlets rather than just online. I built an honesty box, Rena's Treasure Box, for our front garden. (I'll be blogging a how-to on how I made that from a cheapish shed on my next post).

And oddly enough, I realised that if anything, I'm more on a path of becoming someone my Dad would have been proud of now than I was trying to appease a version of him that in actuality he never was. He only ever wanted us to be happy whatever that looked like.

If you're reading this from a dark space in your life, it honestly does get better, you will break yourself out of it when you're ready. Keep depositing whatever happiness you find into your bank account of dreams and one day you'll pay off that debt to sadness.

All my love and thanks for being here,

Rena x