on crying on birthdays

for years, I cried every year on my birthday...

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“Happy Birthday, Izzy.”

For years, I cried every year on my birthday. Birthdays would fill me with a special kind of melancholy. A complex bittersweetness. Both an excuse for a party and also a painful reminder of our impermanence.

Ever since I was a toddler I’ve struggled with embracing the idea of The End. My dad tells me that as a two-year-old I started asking him about ‘what will happen in the end’. And when a pet fish died and I discovered the concept of death, we had a conversation that went a bit like this.

Sitting in the garden by our house, I pointed to the shrubbery and asked,

“Dad, will the trees die?”

“Yes, eventually.”

“And will our house die?”

“Yes, one day it will be gone.”

“Will everything die?”

“Yes, nothing lasts forever.”

“But Dad… will you die?” (starting to look worried and sad)

“Yes sweetheart, I’ll die one day.”

“…Will I die?”

“One day, yes.”

(tearfully) “I don’t want us to die. I want us to be together forever.”

“I know, Bee.”

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Our modern society’s collective fear of aging stems from a fundamental fear of loss.

If nothing lasts forever, that means that everything that we love, we will eventually lose.

Nearly five years ago, I went on a 10-day silent vipassana meditation retreat. This fear of loss arose strongly for me on Day 5 of meditating for twelve hours per day. I felt a devastating wave of fear and grief flood through me from squarely confronting the truth of the intrinsic impermanence of everything I loved and would lose.

But through sitting with the grief and fear, I came to understand it. Even the grief and fear and anger, were actually just different faces of love.

My bittersweet sadness each birthday at the thought that I’m yet another year older, closer to my death, closer to the death of everyone I love, aging, running out of time to fulfil my dreams… was actually because deep down, I really love my life.

The weight we often feel around birthdays isn’t new. The origin of the modern birthday party was the 19th-century Kinderfeste in Germany, where they would celebrate a child’s birthday with a cake, candles and a party.

They would add one candle for every year of life. And the reason for adding a candle each year was to reflect that each year of life was a gift. Each year represented a success, a survival. An accumulation of light and life.

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Last week it was my 29th birthday; 29 years of light. The last year of my 20s.

I still feel bizarrely close to the 20 year old version of myself in my mind, as if she were just here with me last week; even though nearly a decade has passed and I’m a radically different person now. I remember my 20th birthday party in my small Cambridge University room, singing outrageously to “Not Nineteen Forever” by the Courteeners.

And so heading into the last chapter of my 20s, instead of clinging to the feeling that time is running out, my perspective has shifted to embracing impermanence.

“Thank you for this beautiful experience and this full life so far. I hope I get to experience more.”

It’s the ultimate cup half-full or half-empty thing. The same event, different perspective.

Five years ago, on that 10-day silent meditation retreat, I realised that there’s another side to the coin of fear and grief. It’s called love.

And I haven’t cried on my birthday since.

I began to see each birthday as a quiet marker of having truly lived all the way to this point. A reminder of everything that makes life so full.

Birthdays, like the New Year, are small thresholds. Moments to honour who we were, and choose who we are becoming.

I’ve always found it powerful to write letters to my past and future selves around these milestones. If you’d like to try it too, here are some journal prompts I love:

🌟 What would I thank the person I was a year ago for carrying, even when it was heavy? What did she not know yet, that I now understand?

🌟 What seeds am I planting now that I hope my future self will nurture? What do I hope future-me remembers about who I am right now?

🌟 What part of myself am I ready to thank and release to step fully into who I am becoming next?

Maybe in the end, loving our messy, imperfect, impermanent lives - completely as they are, not as we wish them to be - is all birthdays were always about.

And I can get on board with that.

Lots of Love,

Izzy xxx

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I’d love to hear your reflections on reaching new milestones, and the ways you choose to approach them now compared to your younger self. Please feel free to share your thoughts down below 💜

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Other Life Updates

👩🏻‍🎨 I started Chinese calligraphy lessons recently, and I’ve loved being a total beginner at something again! It’s been humbling and inspiring seeing my classmates’ and teacher’s beautiful brush technique and characters compared to my irregular misshapen ones. Lots to improve on!

🐒 I went on a family outing with my husband Ali and my baby daughter to the Hong Kong Botanical Gardens. They have monkeys there, and truth be told, this outing was more for me than for my daughter - I was way more impressed than she was 😅

🎥 I filmed and uploaded two new YouTube videos, one on transforming your life before 2026 and the other on starting and growing a YouTube channel. Hope you enjoy(ed) watching them!

👩🏻‍💻 I’ve been hard at work helping to craft the curriculum for Sparkle Studios’ Lifestyle Business Academy course. It’s been an all hands on deck situation for the team to create something of value that we’re all proud of. We had our very first cohort starting recently and it’s just been incredible seeing the course come to life.