To someone who does not celebrate the day of their birth, saying "Happy Birthday" may do harm.
Channel: Ari R pronouns she or they
Date: 2020-08-20

I created this piece of performance art as a therapeutic exercise for my 39th birthday: I recorded myself burning the instances of 20 August off of the multi-year calendar in the front pages of a two-year planner. 

I filmed in my kitchen not only for safety reasons to be near the sink if me or the flame became overzealous about its birth and sought to overfeed it but also because kitchens and bathrooms are my least favorite room in any living space, and the stove made a better symbolic preparation space than the bathroom counter.

In our home, the kitchen is the room that has experienced the most deterioration and the least revitalization since I mortgaged it with a man I loved who killed himself within two years of our purchasing a home together. The microwave mounted above it sometimes loses power if we tax it with a bag of popcorn, and it loses time even if we give it breaks for days in a row. The refrigerator to the left of the stove is the only appliance that has been replaced since I moved in, and it was only replaced because one of my professors graciously agreed to deliver her old one to my home when she bought a replacement when the one that came with the house was starting to fail. To the right of the stove, a tiny little water heater was installed AND THEN WALLED IN under the countertop. What an adventure replacing a walled in water heater will be when that finally fails, too.

In more public spaces, kitchens and bathrooms symbolize the challenging and messy business of sustaining life. I cope poorly with an eating disorder and prefer to minimize my exposure to food and reminders of food, and I do not enjoy the processes of cooking or cleaning food preparation materials. I used to let my binge disorder control my life to the extent that I would cook an entire one pound box of spaghetti for myself for dinner and waste money on magnesium citrate to flush my system of my emotional eating. It did not work.

My current husband was creeped out by the magnesium citrate flushes when he moved in around 9 years ago, and he encouraged and inspired me to incorporate exercise more thoroughly into my life. 

I filmed on my stovetop, which has been broken for 11 years, to symbolize the lasting damage of long-term poverty and I kept my face out of the frame for most of the experience because whatever we suffer, we do not suffer it alone. I am one of many who want to die, and I have a right to express myself.

I am uploading the uncut version of the video because I prefer access to learning and production processes.

The shirt I am wearing in the video is my "protest shirt," and it's one of the earliest items I purchased for myself as a public protest. When I was in high school, we sold these shirts to save the rain forest. We didn't.

The aphorism on the shirt still rings true. We can't eat money, and we still haven't reacted to that realization on a meaningful level. But we sure can use it to hurt each other, and I feel disgusted with myself and humanity every time I slip that shirt on over a Victoria's Secret sports bra.

I do not celebrate my birthday because I have been coping poorly with chronic depression, a binge disorder, and PTSD for almost three quarters of my life. I have been both a survivor and a perpetrator of sexual harrassment and domestic violence, and I have been a perpetrator of sexual assault, so I do not ask for compassion regarding the long-term sexual harrassment that escalated my feelings about my birthday from "I wish people would pretend I don't have a birthday" to "I feel the active need for my birthday to not exist anymore in addition to my self not existing."

My "freedom" to avoid prison for offenses - regardless of whether I have or have not committed them - doesn't feel much like freedom when I cannot muster the energy to seek meaningful employment that pays a living wage and I am against my will breaking commitments that I would honor if I had access to resources to honor them. This is why I support enacting reparations for slavery and student loan debt, and why I support legalizing AND LEGITIMIZING universal basic income, health care for all with a right to second opinion, and cannabis and prostitution with expunging the records of offenders.

I also recognize that I am still too toxic to calmly explain to every person who learns when my birthday is that I choose not to celebrate my own existence. Ten minutes and ten seconds is a long time. It's longer than the eight minutes and forty six seconds George Floyd suffered.

What I do ask is that we learn to share.