Dear Lacey, just before Christmas 2019, you told me that if you got Barbies for Christmas, you would love them but you wouldn’t tell your friends because you were worried they would take the piss and call you a baby… not those exact words but it’s basically what you said and my response? Using child appropriate language – fuck that.

I’ve constantly put off the idea of growing up, clinging to the fringes of my childhood with prittstick fingertips. Refusing to let go of the days when it was socially acceptable to roll up our jeans and wade through the murky water in the middle of the woods by the bridge. The days where monsters resided in storybooks and rainbows really did lead to pots of gold.

I suppose my complete disregard towards the fact that I was getting older and adulthood was no longer creeping up on me slowly, it was, instead, hurtling towards me, pausing briefly midair – just long enough to portray its jawbreaking force in a Jackie Chan style fly kick – and forcing me to accept my fate was because, as a rebel without a cause, lack of choice isn’t exactly my mate.

Becoming an adult, to me, meant admitting the “For The Boys” tattoo I have on my ankle was no longer the imagery to an amusing anecdote of me and my bestfriend sat opposite my work, chugging Lucozade sport and nursing hangovers, playing a game of odds on but it was now an irresponsible brand i’m stuck with. It meant that writing disgustingly whimsical poetry in the back of my friends Corsa on our way to the beach wasn’t comically pretentious, it was just fucking annoying. The mountains of dirt we dug up to create stunt hills for our BMX’s now wear grass coats and the garages we built our dens in were knocked down. Growing up meant everything had to change. It meant I had to change. It’s something i’ve remained relatively apprehensive of over the years, however, it was happening whether I liked it or not so I dealt with it the only way I knew how – by digging my heels in and refusing to conform to social norms. I am but a medicore rebel because I don’t like getting into trouble but this, I could do.

So, I changed absolutely nothing except I started paying my own bills and setting up direct debits.

And I’ll tell you something, this adult malarkey, not all that bad. You see, not socially acceptable doesn’t mean illegal, merely frowned upon and I could deal with that. I don’t regret my FTB tattoo (I regret others, but not that one) and if I desperately wanted to, I could navigate my way through the hard fern field layer of the woods and track down the BMX mound we’d created.

Becoming an adult, much to my surprise, didn’t mean stopping everything I enjoyed doing, it just meant that “for the boys” became a less satisfactory response to questions like “why did you do that?” and I would have to hold my hands up every now and again and admit that I’m just a dumb bitch sometimes and I like to revel in the innocence my childhood gave me here and there. I realised that I could have as much fun as I wanted and I could do what I wanted. The same as you, if you like to play with Barbies then play with Barbies, I inadvertantly tried to force Spiders to become vegan when I was younger by collecting them in bottles and “feeding” them nothing but leaves, believe me, Barbies is not the strangest thing you could be doing.

In short, as long as your bills are paid and you’re going to your job or college or school or doing whatever it is that you’re supposed to be doing then that’s your adulting completed, for the rest of it, don’t take life too seriously because when you’re about to clock out, other people’s opinion on how you lived your life won’t matter nearly as much as the fact that you loved living it.

I love you, Moosh x