AITA for being annoyed that my housemates woke me up to cut a birthday cake even though I’ve said I don’t celebrate my birthday or eat cake?

I don’t like celebrating my birthday. I just don’t enjoy the attention or the rituals around it. I’ve been very clear about this over the years. I don’t tell people my birthday, I don’t celebrate it, and I don’t eat cake or sweets in general. I might have a piece of chocolate very rarely. When my housemates have birthdays, I usually politely decline cake or sweets. They’re aware of this.

Over the past week, I’ve been working late-night shifts and was feeling pretty tired, so I’ve been sleeping during my day off to recover. Recently, my housemates woke me up to cut a cake for my birthday. I was irritated for several reasons:

– I’ve explicitly said I don’t celebrate my birthday
– I don’t eat cake
– I was woken up without warning
– It wasn’t even my actual birthday
– They were filming the whole thing with flashlights on, and I had just woken up, so the lights were hurting my eyes.

I understand they probably meant well but it felt like my wishes were completely ignored. The gesture didn’t feel like it was for me especially since I wasn’t going to eat the cake anyway. I didn’t make a scene but I was visibly annoyed and withdrew. When they mentioned celebrating my birthday, I said it wasn’t even my birthday that day. A few of them were surprised, while others said they knew and were just celebrating early.

I later talked to my sibling about it and they think I was ungrateful and should have just eaten the cake and enjoyed the moment instead of being overly rigid. I feel like it’s reasonable to be upset when people ignore clearly stated boundaries even when they think they’re doing something nice. AITA?

2 thoughts on “AITA for being annoyed that my housemates woke me up to cut a birthday cake even though I’ve said I don’t celebrate my birthday or eat cake?”
  1. Everything they did was for themselves and not for you and selfish and AH behavior. Celebrating someone’s birthday is supposed to be for the birthday person and not unpleasant for them or make their life harder.

    If you didn’t want to celebrate then they shouldn’t have forced a celebration on you. And regardless waking someone up to ambush them like that is unpleasant.

    NTA

    1. Honestly, they were filming it? The first thing that crossed my mind was that they expected OP to make a scene and were hoping to post it online.

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