Hooray for doing things you wanted to do in 2004 but were too busy being constrained by being nine to do so

After this week, I never want to hear a peep out of my inner child ever again because she's had enough now! No more! Her time is O.V.E.R

I did not like being a child. It was shit. It did not suit me.  

Looking back, there was this weird understanding it was not my time to shine. My freedom was curtailed, and there wasn’t anything I could do but wait. I thought being a teenager would be better, which turned out to be partly true, but that wasn’t a picnic either. Then I went to university, and that was when I would come alive, and it would sort me out. But funnily enough, it didn’t really make any sense. 

(Ring, ring, it gets better, bitch)

Then I got a job. And after staring at spreadsheets and admin proved to be terrible,  I thought it would be fun to use my Twitter addiction to make a living and then got a MA in Journalism, so now I am here letting you know that adulthood is kinda lit (not that freelance journalism isn’t it own special kind of hell). Being one, even one in 2023, and all the awfulness that entails beats being a kid.

Don’t send me back, please. 

I say this because, in the past several days, I have had some experiences that my ten-year-old self would have lost her fucking mind at. For example, I was front row at Natasha Bedingfield’s set at Mighty Hoopla. Wee naturally blonde Clara’s green eyes would have widened to the size of dinner plates at the prospect of belting out ‘These Words’ and ‘Unwritten’ with 30,000 of south London’s thottiest dressed members of the LGBT+ community and their allies. On a separate but related note, she’d also be confused by the prospect of actually having boobs. Still, she wouldn’t know that Sydney Sweeney in ‘Euphoria’ would make it into something she’d be weirdly okay with, but a little mystery is important.  

Another thing that happened to me recently that would have made her die dead was interviewing and meeting McFly, who released their eighth studio album, ‘Power to Play’ on Friday, a homage to guitar bands like AC/DC, Van Halen and Def Leppard. 

For me - either a brave person trying to pave out a career as a culture journalist or a complete fool treading water in a dying industry - this was a milestone because when I was 11, I was obsessed with them. And as mentioned above, freelance journalism is hard, and you have to celebrate your wins!

During the interview, I mentioned that I was one of their tween fans, which I meant as a compliment and a reflection on their evolving style and long presence in the industry. Instead, it came out as a symptom of my foot in mouth in disease because it correctly implied that this is no longer true. I had meant it as an ‘Oh, have you noticed your fans grow up with you?”, not an ‘I think you are shit,’ which I do not because they are lovely and if you love 80s rock, you should stream their album because it’s good, not because they just so happen to be lovely and helped a 28-year-old fool’s 17-year dream come true after their mother wouldn’t let her go to the album signing in HMV after the free concert they put on in Ocean Terminal they made their older sister take them too (which they did). 

 Being confronted with all this nostalgia, a drug that should be treated with precaution, has reinforced how right I was to find being a child hard.  While autonomy in adulthood is improved when you are materially blessed, and my life is just a series of sometimes unbearably mundane events, it’s superior. 

Yes, capitalism is shit, but at least now I don’t have to deal with the crap of childhood while resisting neoliberalism. The Labour front bench might want us to die in a climate crisis hellfire, but now I can pay people I find on Instagram to permanently draw on my arm. I can listen to Taylor Swift (or what other else takes my aural fancy) all day. I can spend my precious free time knocking about with fun people who find my brand of annoying charming and vice versa. I can write about Paris Hilton for a living. And I don’t have a curfew?

Oh, what is it that you say? I have no traditional symbols of adulthood, panic in my head? Well, stop with your conventional nonsense and brb just gonna pre-order ‘Speak Now’ (Taylor’s Version) on vinyl….