Birthday candles are a scoreboard, not an alarm. Every one is a year you made it.

Getting older reads as loss only if you assume you started with a full balance that is being spent down. Read the other way, a birthday counts what you got through: the year you survived, the things you worked out, the version of yourself you no longer have to be. Nobody is behind schedule, since the schedule was absorbed from other people rather than issued to you.

On your next one, list five things you can do now that you could not do last year. Small counts. That list is the real number.