Not a Fuck Up; Just a Writer

 

It’s my birthday today.  I’m 28.  That’s pretty close to 30, and when you’re pretty close to 30 I figure you can no longer lay claim to the ‘very young’ tag.  I bade farewell to the rose coloured glow of uber-youth a year ago, in a fit of tears and snot and with about as much dignity as a cavorting drunk in the emerging dawn at Revolver.  

It was a year ago that I decided I wasn’t young anymore.  Youthful, yes.  But not the kind of young where people forgive you your indiscretions purely because ‘She’s just a baby!’  Not the kind of young where it’s perfectly acceptable to be flitting around from shitjob to shitjob to nojob, in fact it’s a rite of passage.  Not the kind of young where you can do just about anything- drugs included, and it’s all just part of the fun.   

   

The day I turned 27 I decided that no matter how I framed it, it would be both delusional and desperate to continue to lay claim to the young-and-dumb label.  I had landed un-ceremoniously in my late 20’s, and I wasn’t happy.  I didn’t have a job.  My writing was making about as much progress as my dole cheque increases, and my parents didn’t approve of my boyfriend.   I was homeless.  Tom and I were planning on traveling, taking some time out to figure out where to go next, so had moved out of our Brunswick share house.  For some reason we had done it just shy of Christmas, meaning we had to wait it out for the family gathering we had promised to go to.  I had parked at my parents house, in the tiny room at the end of the corridor where Mum had laid me down a few days after being born, and that’s where I found myself, heaving great gooby-laden sobs into the pillow, trying to figure out how on Earth I’d gotten here.  I was 27 today, and my shambles of a life could no longer be excused by tender youth.  I was just a fuck up. 

How had I gotten there?  I’d been swept up in the whole Brunswick-hippy mantra of abhorring the system while simultaneously suckling from its welfare-provisioning-teat.  I’d justified my lifestyle choice by squeezing under the ‘struggling artist’ umbrella with all the other drug-guzzling alternative types, and spent far more time partaking in the drug-guzzling than the artistry.  Somehow in the bubble it had all seemed perfectly fine, but now I was pushing 30 and with sudden and acute horror realizing that it totally fucking wasn’t.             

I’m 28 today and I’m not sobbing and I’m not in bed.  Nor am I freaking out about getting another year closer to 30.  My life isn’t within spitting range of meeting the expectations of 12 year old Katie; no highly paid career, still in hospitality, and not yet with child.  She would have been horrified.  But I have two pigs, and enough money to buy myself a new dress.  And unlike last year, I’m happy.  I spent so many years thinking I should be something more than a writer, but deep down inside, not really wanting to do anything else.  So I procrastinated, socializing and taking drugs, hoping that a career would magically manifest itself.  It didn’t, and I suppose the revelation of last year’s birthday was the kick up the ass I needed to go get what I really wanted.  I am happy now, because I’m finally letting myself be ‘just’ a writer.       

I wasn’t ready to be 27.  I am ready to be 28.  Maybe by 29 I will have actually sold a few books!