The Bench

On birthdays, loneliness, and the slow work of belonging

It was May 29, 2013. My birthday.

I had been living in New York City for a year and had started a new job as a Community Manager at WeWork a week earlier. Living in New York City was my dream. I had read about it in Just Kids by Patti Smith and A Freewheelin’ Time by Suze Rotolo and hoped for the bohemian version of New York, alive with accidental friendships and creative collisions and the feeling that you were exactly where you were supposed to be.

That was far from what I found.

I had no plans for my birthday and decided to enjoy the nice weather with a walk home from work. I called my dad back as I began my walk and sat down on a bench in the park to take it. We talked about nothing in particular until he said the thing he genuinely, lovingly meant: “I hope you spend the day surrounded by people you love and who love you.”

I immediately felt the tears welling up in my eyes.

The intention was beautiful. But at that moment in my life, it was one of the hardest things to hear. I thanked him quickly and rushed to get off the phone. And then sat there on that bench, surrounded by strangers walking in pairs and trios, everyone apparently belonging somewhere. Except for me… on my birthday.

I had nobody to celebrate with. My long-distance boyfriend was in DC. My roommate was wonderful but didn’t think to make a plan. I didn’t need a party. I just wanted someone in my city to want to be with me that night. And there wasn’t anyone.

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I’ve thought about that bench a lot since then.

It was undoubtedly the saddest I’ve ever been on a birthday and one of the loneliest moments I can remember. I spent many years afterward feeling chronically lonely, but that birthday was the clearest measure of it.

There’s something about birthdays that reveals the shape of your life as it actually is. A birthday strips away the ordinary routines that can make loneliness feel manageable. It asks a simple, brutal question: who shows up? And when the answer is nobody, there’s nowhere to hide from it.

What I didn’t consider then is how many other people have their own versions of that bench. The person who moved to a new city for a job and spent their first Thanksgiving eating takeout alone. The woman who threw herself a birthday dinner and worried, for weeks beforehand, whether anyone would come. The man who described his social life as “wide but shallow” with a hundred acquaintances, but nobody to call in a crisis.

Loneliness at this scale doesn’t look the way we picture it. It doesn’t look like an elderly person eating alone in a diner. It looks like a capable, ambitious young woman crying in a park in New York on her birthday, surrounded by people and completely invisible.

It’s so common. And so rarely said out loud.

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Last weekend, I celebrated my birthday in Chicago, one year into building a life here, surrounded by family and friends that I genuinely love. The contrast to that park bench is not lost on me.

A very happy birthday surrounded by loved ones

But I want to be honest about what this year has actually looked like.

I have felt lonely in Chicago. I have missed the friends and the rhythms of my Spanish life. I have felt out of place.

And still, I showed up. Through discomfort. Through the invitations I wasn’t sure I wanted to send, the rooms I wasn’t sure I belonged in, the work of letting people see me before I was certain they’d want to.

The part nobody tells you about building belonging is that it’s slow. It’s a hundred small choices - saying yes to the thing you’re too tired for, initiating instead of waiting, showing up even when you’re not sure you’re wanted. It accumulates so gradually you almost don’t notice it happening.

Until one day you do.

I didn’t find this by accident. I built it over time.

I share this because if you’re somewhere in the middle right now - somewhere between the bench and the table - I want you to know: the middle is real, and it’s hard, and you are not the only one sitting in it.

The table comes. Keep going.