At 4.12am this morning it officially became my birthday. I am 29.
While there are undoubtedly nice parts of the day for me (Presents! Phone calls! Greeting Cards! Mobile Texts! Facebook Messages!), I must admit that the day of my birth has historically been a blue one for me. Not for any morbid reason (no-one I know has died), but because it’s the day of the year I have held up my accomplishments of the passing year to the bright light of an x-ray screen and found in the print some sort of blight or province of weakness.
This is usually because in whichever year of my life I happen to find myself, I compare my achievements with Famous Young Authors:
When I was 19, I was depressed because Matthew Lewis wrote The Monk in a ten week frenzy (making him quite ill, if I remember. R.L. Stevenson wrote Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hydein the same fashion, but over a much shorter time. Read up on that story, it’s a little gem.) Bret Easton Ellis was of a similar age when Less Than Zero came out.
And what had I done? Gotten drunk and table-danced at the local university pub, famed for it’s periodical attempt to revive Topless Bar Wench Nights.
Classy.
When I was 24 I was depressed because that was Zadie Smith’s age when White Teeth came out.
While I was slogging my guts out – quite successfully, mind – as a conference coordinator, pandering to the drunken requests of unbuttoned accountants, many of which were hitting on me, despite my newly acquired engaged status, and damn nice ring to prove it.
[You get my point….]
And now I am 29, you see, the field of published first-time writers has thickened up slightly and so I suppose I find a little solace in that. I have always, always, been the kind of girl who like to beat the statistics, the bell-curve, anything which offers to provide solid proof that what is worth doing, is worth doing well: Even better if you’re a whippersnapper.
So each year – because my blockbuster novels have not reached the shelves – I place my yardstick up to other arbitrary goals or things.
When I was 25 I was quite satisfied that – statistically speaking – I was much younger than the ‘typical’ first-time Australian mother (which was 29 at last count; although I would’ve been par for the course if I was American).
All of this would suggest that I am a highly-driven, ambitious, perhaps misguided soul, who ranks her own life against ‘extraordinary’ people, and will naturally falter because of this. No – I just think it shows what a mega-book geek I truly am.
Recently, I had an email chat with a blogger friend – a big A-Lister whose name I won’t divulge here, but she knows who she is – who mentioned that I seemed rather ambitious with my blogging. I replied that I guess I was ambitious, but in a nebulous kind of way; a way that I still have no idea what I’m really doing – here on the blog, or in life – which I guess that makes me part amateur-dilettante/ part wide-eyed, smart-mouth.
And you know what? After writing all this, I think I’m okay with that. For once.
Happy Birthday to me!
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Daughter on the mend, and a husband who’s taken the day off work to give me some much needed TLC. I don’t need anything else, that will be wonderful.
*parents of little children will recognise this song from the venerable Justine Clark album, “I like to Sing!” I was not paid for this blatant endorsement!
