I don't know if I want to commit to celebrating my birthday anymore

Ig for context, my birthday is on 9/11. I (22f) was born 2 years after the attacks, but still. It's become a borderline unhealthy obsession of mine to study, and it's because I've pretty much been told my entire life that my birthday isn't important because people died that day. That I'm not worth being celebrated on that day due to the mass casualties.

My biodad did it. Granted, he made \*everything\* about himself, but to the eyes of a child, that hurt a lot. It was hard to go to school and hear how tragic that day was for a country I live in and love (outside of the current things in which I shall not discuss), to hear all day and have birthday pins taken off my shirts and backpacks as a child because it's a "sad day, and we don't celebrate on sad days", to then come home to being told it's not important in a different way.

And while my mom, dad, brother, and friends, even coworkers now, do their best to celebrate my birthday and make me feel appreciated and important, I feel like it's just not worth the effort this year. Like I might as well just stop bothering with the excitement I feel because it's not that I don't feel excited and giddy on my birthday, I just feel like I shouldn't feel like that.

Hell, my mom, in an attempt to make me feel better about it all, asked if I wanted to lie about when my birthday really was so people wouldn't be jagoffs to me about it. At 7 years old, because her child was hurting and she didn't know what else to do to make people stop hurting me. To even see if she could change it legally so people wouldn't be mean or accuse me of lying once I got older. At 7 years old, after a day of belittlement and being told I'm not important enough at school and at home by my biodad, through tears and sobs of absolute heartbreak of baby's first, I told her I didn't wanna live a lie. That people should just be nicer because yes, people died, but that shouldn't mean I get the anger taken out on me for it.

It's become that the guilt of wanting to kinda make up for lost time because of those young childhood moments, and the guilt of wanting to feel important for 5 seconds just because it's my birthday just feels…… overwhelming. Like I'm carrying the weight of those who died on my shoulders every year while trying to celebrate like everyone else gets to do.

There's just this weird urge to go visit NYC for those memorials, to visit Shanksville, PA, to apologize and memorialize these people who died before I was even alive. Like it'd put to rest the guilt I'm feeling.

Maybe it's deep-rooted trauma, maybe it's just that I feel selfish for wanting to feel celebrated, maybe it's Maybelline. Who knows? I just… I wanna celebrate my birthday without feeling like a selfish jagoff for it. I wanna feel something other than anxiety with my birthday around the corner. 10 whole days around the corner.