It's Not My Birthday.

A "party," deferred.

I've written about birthdays before. Today is mine. These bring up feelings that are mixed, in adulthood. I haven't had a birthday party for about a decade. I even had someone offered to throw one for me this year, but I ended up on a work trip, and she ended up grieving the impending loss of her mother.

Momentous things have happened in the world on May 6, the day when I celebrate, and I use that word loosely, my birthday.

It's also the birthday of Sigmund Freud. I am a psychiatrist, so that's cute. Similarly fitting, given my mother's time-limited marriage to his grandson, it was the birthday of Orson Wells. in less auspicious but similarly fitting May 6 history, it's the day the Hindenburg Zeppelin Immolation became the most iconic disaster of all time. So, too, with birthdays.

Last year, I shared the remarkable revelation I had at the time—for adults, the kind of people who have birthday parties are the people who planned those birthday parties for themselves. You need t…