"Happy" Birthday

The day pain and grief brought me back to myself

This month, I turn 31.
It’s hard to believe a year has passed since the day that changed my life.

February 15th, my 30th birthday, was meant to be a thirty, flirty, and thriving celebration. Instead, it became my breaking point. I had never so intensely felt a reckoning, one that brought me face to face with my body, my grief, and the undeniable fact that I was still alive. I was so focused on trying to keep my partner alive that I nearly lost sight of myself. I didn’t know it then, but just six weeks later, I would be forced to leave my home, file for divorce, and begin the slow work of untangling what I had lived through.

Last spring, I wrote about that day because I was afraid of forgetting how it felt. A year later, I return to it, able to see the beauty and the pain living side by side. What once felt like an ending has revealed itself as a turning—aching, pivotal, and reverent in ways I’m still understanding.

I’ve always believed in the power of our stories, how they connect us, how they build community in seasons of survival. That belief has been echoed back to me again and again over the past year. My hope in sharing this is not to offer answers, but to offer recognition, trusting that within our own stories, we can find strength, tenderness, and a way forward.

What follows is the story of that day,
the one that taught me how fragile,
and how sacred, being alive really is.

---

We’re So Glad You’re Alive

Somehow, I’ve arrived—at this cabin, at this day, at this unbearable heaviness that lingers deep within.

Standing in front of the bathroom mirror, I count the incisions on my stomach.
Six.

Each one tender and aching. Streaks of dried tears line my face as my eyes continue to well. My red chest burns and itches, my hands damp with cold sweat.

I take a deep breath; inhale through my nose, exhale from my mouth. The words wake up ring in my ears, but only I can hear it.

My hands cup the cold flowing water from the sink, and I douse my face. I’m alive in there, somewhere, smoldering with desire for change. I’ve reached my breaking point.

Today is supposed to be a day for celebrating, welcoming in a new decade of life. Yet here I am, trying to make sense of the heartache I feel, the anxiety trembling through my body. I’m surrounded by love and joy, and also crippled with a deep pain that’s become impossible to ignore. At this moment, I know that I can’t continue to reel through life the same way. My body, my brain, and my heart are asking for a revolution.

I step out of the bathroom, trying to shake the weight of this grief. It’s my 30th birthday. My closest friends are downstairs, having traveled from all corners of the country to celebrate me. From California to Mississippi, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee, they’ve gathered here in the middle of Logan, Ohio, in the heart of winter.

Just days ago, I wasn’t sure I would make it.

---

Four days earlier, I was admitted to Vanderbilt Hospital after a month of on-and-off gut pain suddenly tipped into something unbearable. Sharp. Relentless. Impossible to ignore. I knew I had to go to the ER.

Within hours, doctors told me I needed emergency gallbladder surgery. Stones were lodged in my bile ducts. I remember lying in a curtained-off space that barely qualified as a room, post-COVID overflow at its finest, asking every doctor who passed, What causes this?

No one had a real answer. Just vague mentions that it happens more often in women. It all felt strange, how something so intense could happen without a clear reason. With little to go on and no other choice, I said yes to the surgery.

Waking up afterward was surreal. I started vomiting immediately, disoriented, while a nurse pressed a cold rag to my forehead. Eventually, I was moved into a room with four walls and a door. I lifted my gown and stared at the fresh incisions on my stomach. Even sitting up sent sharp waves of pain through my body, more than I expected.

My husband arrived later that day. Instead of comfort, his presence brought tension. This was the second time in our three-year marriage that he’d found himself sitting beside my hospital bed. Not even two years prior, I was taken by ambulance to the emergency room after getting sandwiched between a small SUV and an 18-wheeler. My car was totaled, yet injuries were minor, considering; a concussion and contusions to the face.

This time, he wasn’t handling it well. He was scattered. In hindsight, intoxicated. He kept rummaging through a bag I’d packed in a hurry, pointing out items I already knew were there. When he tried to help me stand and walk to the bathroom, something in me recoiled. I wanted him away from me.

Eventually, I told him I just wanted to sleep and asked him to go home to take care of our animals.

I hadn’t mentioned yet—my room was shared. A thin curtain separated me from the person beside me. Every time I bent my arm, the IV alarm blared. Again and again, nurses rushed in to fix the line I couldn’t seem to keep still. I kept apologizing, embarrassed by the noise and the interruption.

Then, from the other side of the curtain, a calm voice spoke.

“It’s okay. Really.”

That’s how I met Brittany.

She was a year younger than me and had just undergone surgery to remove a cancerous mass from her chest wall. Suddenly, my emergency gallbladder surgery felt small. But she never treated it that way. She met me with empathy, never minimizing my pain, never comparing. Just kindness.

As we talked, I learned she’d been battling cancer on and off for ten years. This surgery was just another chapter in a long, exhausting fight. And still, she was steady. Grounded. Comforting. Someone who seemed to have made peace with living in the in-between.

We talked for hours that night, our voices cutting through the quiet, machines beeping in rhythm around us. Instead of frustration, we laughed every time an alarm went off and a nurse shuffled in. For the first time in days, I didn’t feel so alone.

It felt like a real-life Love Is Blind moment—not romantic, but intimate all the same. I had no idea what she looked like, and yet I felt safe with her. As the night stretched on and we shared stories about our lives, families, and pets, I told her about my husband’s struggles with sobriety.

---

I close the bathroom door and walk out to my friend Macy. Her eyes are gentle, and also riddled with dried up tears. She too was crying with me just a few minutes before.

I exhale. She asks softly, “Do you want something to eat?”

My birthday dinner—lovingly cooked by her partner, Elliott, had been ready for over an hour. Everyone had eaten when they were hungry while Macy and I stayed upstairs, bawling our eyes out. Downstairs, my husband slept alone in a bedroom, unaware of where I was.

“Food sounds great”, I tell her, my voice still shaking.

A few minutes later, my friend Matt walks upstairs, hands me a bowl of chili, topped with a piece of cornbread made from a smiley-emoji waffle iron, hugs me and kisses me on the forehead.

He didn’t have to say a word. I knew he could sense the pain I was in.

After a few bites, I breathe again. I wipe my tears. Reality returns slowly.

It’s my birthday.
And I don’t want this moment to be the only thing I remember.

I walk down the stairs and see half the group curled up on the couches, deeply immersed—ironically—in the new season of Love Is Blind. A few more are gathered outside, their faces glowing in the firelight.

The energy is calm and warm, yet there’s a quiet sadness threading through it all—a low, lingering cloud of shared grief.

Everyone feels it, in their own way. That strange pull between celebration and the weight of truth: something has ended here. Not just a life, but a love. A pairing that once moved like a current through this circle—steady, bright, and generous—now stilled. The well they drew from has run dry. And for some, this night is the first time they’re staring into that emptiness, feeling the echo of what used to be.

But more than anything, it’s the death of a person they once knew. The brightest light in any room, that’s how I described him in my wedding vows. Now, that light is gone. Snuffed out.

I try to reemerge into the evening, as if I hadn’t just been doubled over in grief. My body is still tender from the deep, painful cry I had just experienced.

I look toward the kitchen counter and spot the pies my friend Kaitlin brought from a bakery in Cleveland. I motion toward them. “I think we should break into these.”

The room stirs. The table is cleared. Boxes open. Candles are lit. Friends drift inside from the fire, cheeks flushed from the cold. My husband steps out of the bedroom, eyes heavy, hands shaking.

A Happy Birthday hovers in the air. I feel it coming. I know I can’t handle it. One note of that song might send me under. I lean toward Macy and whisper my hesitation.

Without missing a beat, she smiles. “I have an alternative.”

She teaches it to the room.

Happy Birthday to you
We’re so glad you’re alive
You’re a gift from the earth
Bless the day of your birth

Laughter ripples around the dining room table, and the tension in my shoulders loosens. My heart swells for this circle of people who love me. The loneliness I’ve been carrying slips away—if only for this brief, beautiful moment.