I'M 18

Last week was my 18th birthday and it's a weird one. I'm now technically an adult, and do I feel like an adult? To hell I do. My 18th birthday was a Thursday and I spent it like any other Thursday, I went to college and had biology and sociology lessons, I moaned about the 9am start and I watched Netflix in the empty classroom with my friends like we do every Thursday in the three hour break between our morning and afternoon lessons. And everything is normal except the slight little things like I'm suddenly being invited out to the pub to celebrate, and I can go out to Tesco and buy a bottle of wine when we run out at home, and I can book my own doctors and dentists appointments if I feel like it. And most prominently I'm can vote in the major election in May. There's no way I'm old enough or qualitifed enough or grown up enough to have a say in our country's future.

When I was younger I had it all sussed. 18 seemed like light years away, I knew what I wanted with my life, books about fifteen and sixteen year olds had taught me everything I needed to know. When I was younger I had the same image of my future that every single girl has had at some point in her lives. 'When I am sixteen I will have a boyfriend and be friends with all my primary school friends and I will be super cool and popular and go to parties all the time and everyone will be nice and I will get straight As at school and then I will go off to university to study creative writing and then I'll make my future as a best-selling author.' And that's so far from relaity now I feel bad for younger me.

My reality is that now, at just 18, my friends and I would rather sit at home and have naps and play Cards Against Humanity than go out (we recently opted out of a party in favour of a pizza-pj-party at home). I am still in contact with two people from primary school, they are two of my best friends, but I don't have the slightest idea what any of my other primary school friends are doing now, and to be honest I don't really care. And everyone is not as nice and friendly as you would except people to be as they get older.

In reality I did not get straight As at school, and now I am watching all my friends prepare to start university while I still have another year at home. In reality I dropped out of A-Levels and now do a BTEC Level 3 in Health and Social Care. I never thought I would be here when I stared Year 12, and I never though BTEC would suit me so much more than school ever did. I never thought I'd be this happy in education. But that's a different story. In reality, while I would still love to be an author, I'm going to study nursing at university and then I'm going to become a midwife. That's something I never even considered as a child, but it's been my dream for the past six years and I'm so excited to make that happen.

Life is never what you think it's going to be, it never plans out the way it did when you were ten, but I'm pretty damn happy with my lot, and though it's never what I imagined, I wouldn't trade it for my younger self's dreams at all. Happy 18th birthday me.