Happy Birthday, Me.

Tomorrow, on the 29th of December, I will be 24 years old.I would like to begin by saying that I am very grateful to the universe, or God, or science or whatever, for letting me live for so long. I’ll be honest – it’s a bit of a surprise. Twenty-four years is an astonishingly long time, and I am a complete idiot. The fact that I have managed to get here without some sort of interference from a higher power seems ludicrous. Miss Sylvania (Mailbox Surprise), Gil ElvgrenI don’t actually believe in a higher power, by the way. I think that the actual reason for my continuing existence is my mother. I am capable of very little without that woman. In fact, every time I leave the house without her, there is a genuine feeling of concern from all members of my immediate family. If any one of us is going to get murdered, hit by a car or struck down by a sudden illness, it will almost certainly be me. We worry about me, we really do.Speaking of my mother, it may interest you to know that by the time she was twenty-four, she had already given birth to me. She also had a job, her own house and a marriage – I hear about this a lot. It usually crops up whenever I complain about how difficult it is to write an essay and/or how I will be alone for the rest of my life. Apparently I “don’t know I’m born”.Anyway, despite the aforementioned gratitude for my relatively pain-free twenty-four years, I would still like to make a formal complaint about the entire situation.I AM TOO YOUNG TO BE TWENTY-FOUR.Physically, of course, I am a twenty-four year old woman. Most of the time, this isn’t a bad thing. In many ways, I’m more attractive than I’ve ever been. There are some mornings when that’s quite difficult to believe, but there you go.Mentally, however, my development stalled at approximately seventeen years of age. I’m impulsive, irrational, emotional and occasionally psychotic. I have moments of maturity, certainly, but they are few and far between, let me assure you. Telling people that I am in my twenties - were not saying ‘mid-twenties’ just yet - feels horribly askew, and I have a feeling that it will only get worse.Apparently, though, I wasn’t being dramatic enough about my impending age increase. I needed to make myself more anxious about it. As always, facebook did the trick. That’s right! I made the mistake of looking up some former acquaintances. And do you know what I discovered? BABIES. HUSBANDS. HOUSES. JOBS. But whatever. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We need to save all of this blind panic for next year.IT IS OK TO BE RIDICULOUS WHEN YOU ARE TWENTY-FOUR. IT IS LITERALLY FINE.x