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The prompt ‘party’ was extremely timely as it was my birthday last week. And even today, at the age I have become (not yet forty), I hate parties and birthday parties most of all. According to my mother, this has always been the case ever since my first birthday. From what I remember, it was the same for my eighteenth and still the case this week.

Birthdays as an INFJ

According to many tests online about the Meyers-Briggs personality types, I identify most closely with the INFJ type. The core principles are: Introverted, Intuitive, Feeling, and Judging. Add to that my HSP, Highly Sensitive Personality, and you can deduce I’m not a party person. It’s draining for me to be around other people, even the people I love. I need to be alone afterwards to recharge my battery. I despise small talk. After working many years in retail, I know how to talk about the weather, but it’s incredibly dull to me.

Dutch Birthday Parties

I despise the Dutch tradition of celebrating birthdays where you invite friends and family, everyone sits in a circle, and you eat snacks together, most often quite tasteless and dried out from standing open on the table for too long. Overall, it just isn’t much fun. And so, for the past ten years, I don’t really celebrate my birthday anymore. After becoming twenty-one, there’s not much fun in it anyway.

Not a Party Person

My mother used to tell me that after my first birthday party, she totally expected me to be overly excited and fussy like all small children would be after such a busy day. Instead, I said quietly in the corner, playing with the gift wrappings and boxes. So when she threw me a party for my eighteenth birthday and afterwards I told her: ‘I could have gone without a party, you needn’t have done it for me,’ she understood. After all, I had been like that all my life.

This week’s party was fine. I only invited my close in-law family, which I’m close to. We had dinner together, and we played board- and video games. It was a fun evening. And yes, I could’ve gone without, but okay.

So you can’t really say this week’s song matches my personality well. ‘Let’s have a party’ is not something you’ll find me often saying, if at all. I like the song because it brings back memories to when I listened to this CD a lot, back when I was still a huge Backstreet Boys fan. And I guess we did have parties of our own during that time.


Song Lyrics Sunday is a prompt by Jim Adams, other entries can be found here: https://jimadamsauthordotcom.wordpress.com/2021/09/04/blowout-affair/