29 years, 8 months and 2 days old.
I'm 29 years old. I'm 24 years old. I'm 16 years old. I'm 11 today dear Diary!
No matter how often I repeat it like it should mean something, it never ever does. I whisper it aloud to myself - twenty-nine years old - and it feels just like it did when I was seventeen. I'm still just indisputably me inside those ages. Nothing is different in there, although every single thing around me has changed.
But let me indulge myself a minute. I'm 29 years old. What does my life look like?
Eight weeks ago I was living in a two bedroom semi-detached with neutral decor and a mezzanine, with my partner of three years, living the DINKS dream. An academic and a...well whatever I am, housed in the inner north, buying organic groceries and discussing our debt repayment schemes.
This morning I woke up from my mattress on the floor of a small magnolia bedroom with someone else's posters still on the walls. I stumbled out in my pyjamas to say hi to one of my two cute scruffy gay twenty-something housemates and made myself a cup of tea. One cup of tea, not tea for two. Then I took off all my clothes and shivered in the drafty bathroom, getting into the shower that's missing a head, so it's really just a hot tap suspended above a 1970's baby pink bathtub.
Now. Answer me this: Have I gone backwards or forwards?
Lost: Three years of building up a partnership. All my sense of companionship and safety in another person. All my future dreams of the way we'd be there for each other through thick and thin, how we'd look after each other when we were old. My security I thought I had in never having to date again. My lovely in-laws. My potential British residency. Having her arms around me. The smugness of feeling like you're on track to being a grown-up just because you're married.
Found: Freedom to choose what I'll have for dinner tonight or whether I'll have it at all. Freedom to get up in the morning and write all the way until bedtime without anyone making me feel guilty as if my time is stolen from someone else. Freedom to imagine that one day I might just bump into someone who can understand me the way I want to be understood. The chance of getting through a day without being responsible for someone else's unhappiness.
Sometimes you have to go backwards to go forwards.
