My best friend’s 50-year-old mother has better weekends than me.

 

I’m not saying the lady shouldn’t be having fun. She’s fabulous. She’s glamorous. She’s just got back from a solo retreat in Bali. I give her two very enthusiastic thumbs up. But when you compare the snapchats she sent out this weekend and the snapchats I sent out this weekend, it paints a pretty bleak picture.

 

She went to the Gold Cost this weekend, Australia’s severely underwhelming answer to Las Vegas. She sent out snapchats of her and a sweet honey poolside. I however, sent out snapchats like this:

Admittedly, her “sweet honey” was her husband of a few decades and she wasn’t taking a beer bong from a former Big Brother housemate or anything. But the contrast between our posts is still alarming.

 

As a young person, I’m supposed to be a heaving, drunken mess. I should spend my Sunday mornings telling a bunch of cackling girls wearing sunnies with lenses the size of dinner plates about the schlep I up woke up next to earlier that day. I should be swinging on the rails of party buses. I should have to take dresses to dry cleaners’ and avoid questions about what the stains on the fabric are. I’m at the age when I’m at the cusp of taking a long hard look at myself and tell that self to grow up.

 

And while I may be wearing a pyjama set with glitter and a Disney character on the jumper, I find myself needing to grow…down?

 

I have been conditioned to think that in order to grow, you first need to have your dirty hoodrat stage. I can’t get to my happy ending without realising that I have to change everything about who I am – especially if I want a man to be included in that ending. And I don’t think I have had enough of a wild time make me face some hard truths to catapult me into successful, blissful adulthood.

 

I mean, no one wants to have to chew on an emergency contraceptive pill for breakfast or be too hungover to enjoy their overpriced avocado on toast, but the precursors to these things usually involve a laugh or two. It gives you something to do other than find yourself accidentally hooked on The Mask of Zoro on TV, spending your Saturday night watching it right until the end despite the frustrating ad breaks. I’m supposed to be wracking up debts and sexually transmitted diseases with wild holiday flings. This all comes back to my idea that my life could be a television series. Who the hell would watch a show about someone who’s big weekend plans involve allowing herself to have her eggs with toast AND butter. I mean, prepubescent Kirsten Dunst was right, butter is divinity, but it won’t get you laid.

 

People around my age make rules for themselves that they inevitably break: I’ll never mix tequila and whiskey again; I’ll never sleep with Trevor again; That’s the last time I do blow off a Larry Emdur look-alike’s abs. But these rules are always broken, and they are usually broken on the weekend. In a way, I’m like these sequin-clad people. I make a rule and find myself breaking it on a weekend, when I’m weak and not thinking straight. But my version of this is much more boring; my rule is “I’ll never overzealously prod my ears with an cotton tipped bud until it hurts or I cough”. And when I break the rule, it’s far less fun. It means I can’t hear properly for a little while and sometimes get shooting pains in my eardrum. As I raise that little white prodding stick to my earhole, I don’t have a table of girls screaming their “woos” at me, it’s just me and the sound of my bathroom’s exhaust fan drowning out the silence of my decaying soul. I need to fuck my life up fast, so I can then un-fuck my life. It’s complicated, but suffice to say I need to create the kind of memories that will make for an interesting tell-all book on my youth and right now I have nothing to tell. I have to do something about it now because if I wait much longer I’ll be too old to be considered a hot mess and will instead be labelled “sad” or “needs help”. I only have a brief window in which I can be a wreck but still have a future. The time for recklessness is now!

 

But I think I’ll start tomorrow: I’ve already showered and the first episode of the new season of Grand Designs to starts in like 20 minutes.