The Birthday Profiles

I hope I remember

Walking out of a shepherd’s hut in the Brecon Beacons to eat coffee and croissants in the sun, I turned twenty-five much in the way fifteen year old me would’ve liked to. I know this because I know her. Not just from existing still in some spectral way inside my head, but from the notebooks she left behind: the detailed diary entries and the more obscure fraught journal scribbles, the scrapbooks and poems. Also between the pages of a red notebook dotted with pink butterflies sits, narcissistically, an autobiographical profile. She describes her appearance, what she likes to wear; her friends and classmates; her taste in music; her hopes, her dreams, her political point of view. Across a dozen notebooks over the past ten years, similar profiles document a move from adolescence to adulthood. Ten snapshots of the subtle ways that change happens over time (there should be eleven, but last year I forgot. Including that fact makes this whole thing seem only a little less self-centred).

It’s interesting to me now, as I spend so much time thinking about ghosts and haunting and the imprints that we leave, that my fifteen year old self was conscious of these ideas in some form. I often think of my interest in these ideas stemming from university and encountering academic texts which talked about liminality, obscurity, blurred borders and spectrality. When I look at my diaries from my teenage years, I see an eagerness to document every experience, every event that I perceived to be crucial towards building a sense of self. Sometimes I wish I had that same impulse now: I’m far less attentive towards keeping a diary, as forgetting last year’s profile might demonstrate. I think as a teenager I already had formed a keen sense that, in spite of my strong-willed nature, I was most definitely going to change. I anticipated it, I knew it was coming without knowing when it would arrive. These birthday profiles became a way to tether those changes that felt so insubstantial and monumental at the same time. The girls documented there are sometimes like-minded, sometimes in disagreement. They wear their hair differently, listen to different music and have new friends. They never know what’s coming next.

Dylan Thomas’s thirtieth birthday began with the water. He walked through Laugharne, noticing with intensity the trill of the birds and the sway of the trees before hoping that these mysterious wonders of nature would remain present in one year’s time. ‘Poem In October’ is one of Dylan Thomas’s birthday poems; ‘Poem on His Birthday’ is, unsurprisingly, another. This second poem, documenting his thirty-fifth birthday, is bleaker. He feels this time no hope of another year’s turning, but a sobering sensation that he is moving ever-closer toward death with each year of celebration. It’s eerie that he would die at just thirty-nine, four years after counting his blessings aloud, grateful for four elements and five senses.

I’m not trying to claim that my fifteen-year-old self had a deep philosophical perspective on ageing, or expressed it with the same gravitas as Thomas. It was interesting to come across his poems for the first time, though, to see a more skilfully expressed documentation of self, and an articulate understanding of what a birthday marks. Change is often imperceptible. I feel it now, watching my niece who is two. I feel like I was present for her whole first two years on earth, but suddenly she’s someone different to the tiny baby I held in April 2021. If I want to, though, I can take myself back through the thousands of photos we’ve taken of her, track the emergence of her teeth through her gums, the strands of hair grow on her head. I think my yearly about-mes do something similar. I trawl through the embarrassing notebooks and can pinpoint the entrance of a musician, a friend, a TV show into my life. When life and a sense of self feels so difficult to understand in a fixed way, writing about yourself like this feels like fixing something in time, marking your existence like carving initials into the side of a tree.

I think it’s interesting then, that Thomas embraces that transience. I don’t think he’s necessarily happy about it, but he accepts that it’s a condition of being. His poems are less about himself and more about the world in which he exists, and which he’s aware he’ll exist in for so little time. In the rest of his work, these kinds of images recur: memory is blurry, fleeting, rose-tinted. Life is finite, claustrophobic, limiting against what feels like the limitless bounds of imagination. Knowing that change is inevitable doesn’t need to be filled with an instinct for preservation, but can be leaned into, whether comfortable or not.

I would like to write about myself at 25, and write it in my journal. This time, though, I might think less about what I consume, and more about what I feel, what I think, what I hope I know.