4 Birth Months Who Are So Thin-Skinned, Their Internal Organs Are Visible

DISCLAIMER: This article is not meant to be taken literally. It is not meant to be taken seriously. Above all, it is not meant to be taken personally. If you read this and take offense, congratulations—you’ve just confirmed everything we all suspected about you.

February

You are so touchy and hypersensitive that people have to carefully select, inspect, and individually wrap every word before handing it to you. This will only give you an excuse to accuse them of “hiding something.” A mild suggestion sends you to bed for three days. A slightly impatient sigh in your general direction and you are composing a lengthy, single-spaced letter that begins with “I just want you to know how that made me feel.” The neighbors three doors down have learned to modulate their tone. The mailman has learned to modulate his tone. You are so delicate and easily wounded that a light breeze leaves you covered in bruises.

June

You are so needy, clingy, and suffocating that people have a recurring fantasy about faking their own death just to get an afternoon to themselves. You have feelings about everything. Your feelings have feelings. Someone forgets to text you back within the hour and you are already standing in the kitchen at 2am eating cereal directly from the box and wondering what you did wrong. You are so desperate for reassurance that you will ask the same question six different ways hoping one of the answers will finally satisfy you. None of them ever will. But you will never stop seeking reassurance.

October

You are so brooding and vengeful that other people’s therapists have started billing you by the hour just for the secondhand trauma. You do not let things go the way a black hole does not let light go — completely, permanently, and with tremendous gravitational force. Someone cut you off in traffic in 2009 and you still know what they were wearing. You have a memory like a steel trap and the temperament of someone who has been inside one. If someone crosses you once, you will spend the next decade being inexplicably, mysteriously, and magnificently awful to them at every opportunity, and when they finally ask what they did, you will say “nothing” and mean the opposite of nothing

November

You are a sullen sack of sorrows. You are so exquisitely attuned to slights, real and imagined, that you have developed a sixth sense for being offended. You are so insanely touchy that people have started treating every conversation with you like a hostage negotiation — speaking slowly, making no sudden movements, and keeping both hands visible at all times. You take the entire universe personally. You take things personally that were not directed at you, not about you, and in most cases did not occur in your presence or even in your lifetime. If a little bird cheerily chirps outside your window to greet the dawn, you’re certain that it’s mocking you.