Reflections of adulthood

With every second I hurtle further and further into adulthood. After only two months, I do feel as though I've already mastered the trick of being a grown-up, and that's everything's an act. Look at people. They seem like they've got it together, like they all really know what's going on. I was good enough at being a child to know that nobody is good at being an adult. Everybody is a clueless, wobbling mess, just some are better at hiding it than others. Simon Cowell is particularly good at passing the illusion.

I have no idea what's going on in the world and I'm not ashamed to admit that, but I'd be damned if you ever thought that of me. I perfected a lonesome strut well over a year ago that exudes such belligerent confidence I must look like Jesus Christ reincarnated with the ego of Piers Morgan. Said walk tends to stay inside, largely reserved for when I'm lonely but passively happy. It's a walk that says I'm glad I'm lonely, I wouldn't want your company even if I liked you and a voice in my head was begging to speak to you at great length, probably about Shakespeare, rugby or French language cinema. This walk is the only sign I've got that I'm not failing horribly at this whole being an adult thing.

That and the beard.

God knows how I'd manage to 'act my age' if I was a woman.

On my eighteenth birthday, I received relatively little though amongst the good was a copy of Ten by Girls Aloud. I've spent the last two months, my entire adult life, listening to this particular album pretty much non-stop. I'm listening to it as I write these very words. A few weeks ago, at a midnight screening of Edgar Wrights' excellent The Worlds' End, I had a conversation about the aforementioned girl group in which I was told, by a peer, "I outgrew Girls Aloud when I was nine". I'm eighteen. That's twice her age when she decided she was over Cheryl, Nicola, Sarah and co (Although, if my maths is correct, she would have moved on before the 2005 release of Biology, which makes it almost understandable). This prompted me to reach one of two conclusions, both of which entirely plausable.

The first of which is that I'm significantly more mature. For all her so-called 'growing up', she's only chosen to lock herself out of some of lifes joys (And they don't come much more joyous than Love Machine, trust me). She's trying to show the world that she knows what's going on, that she's in control. I, instead, am blunt and happy to admit that, perhaps, I don't have it all together. I think it's a revelation we all have or all will come to, but I wouldn't blame anybody for not admitting it, especially not to a bearded man who's willing to lose friends over a manufactured pop group at three in the morning.

The other option is that I am a nine-year-old girl, which would not surprise me at all.

Or, of course, we could all be nine-year-old girls. Or nine-year-old boys, at least, high on a concoction of Action Man and Thunderbirds, left to watch spirits plummet as taxes and boyfriends and baked beans on toast leave us marveling at the mundane. The world's a dull place, but a childs eyes presents it with the most gleeful, optimistic colouration. We never outgrow this view, and that's perhaps life's great tragedy. We realise how dull all around us is, but we retain a desire for a greater world. We want to continue listening to Girls Aloud, bubblegum pop blowing through our ears, but instead we have to go to work and fill out tax returns. Familiarity breeds contempt, and contempt breeds boredom. We turn into clueless, wobbling messes, unable to break the cycle. We retain a childs eye, we retain a childs mind. If only we retained a childs panache.