Every year around my birthday, I start collecting ideas for how I should celebrate. Outfits. Restaurants. Hairstyles. Weekend getaways.

But somewhere between the scrolling and the saving, I almost always arrive at the same conclusion: none of it feels like me.

The birthdays I saw online kept getting bigger. Each more elaborate and more curated. Yet the more ideas I collected, the less excited I became. Somewhere along the way, celebrating my birthday had become more about what a birthday should look like than how I actually wanted mine to feel.

After months of solo parenting, daycare drop-offs and pickups, meal planning and cooking, and constantly rearranging the calendar to make everything fit, what I wanted was actually pretty simple. I didn't need another event to organize. I needed quiet. I needed rest. I needed one day where nobody needed anything from me.

I remembered the birthdays I'd spent at Glen Ivy Hot Springs: floating in the lounge pool, red clay tightening on my skin as it dried, controlling my breath as I dipped into the cold plunge. No crazy itinerary, no pressure to document every moment, no performance... just enough space to hear my thoughts.

The older I get, the more I realize I actually love celebrating my birthday. I just like celebrating it my way. I like the quiet. I like having nowhere to be and no one else to take care of. I like having time to think about the year I've lived and what I want from the next one.

Maybe that's what celebrating myself looks like now. Not making the day bigger. Just letting it feel like mine.