I am not baking this week as I’ve been feeling overwhelmed. People say ‘It’s that time of year’ and that it’s the ‘January blues’ but I’ve never felt so snubbed out in January before. Last January there was a lot of excitement; I moved to London, I was in a new flat, and I started my job. So now also marks the time of my one year living in London. I’m not sure I entirely love it. Entirely being key as love for anything is rarely sustained and consistent enough to mean you love it entirely. However, I got a pear and almond danish from Greensmiths near my new place and I can say with my chest that I loved it entirely. I don’t usually go for pear in a pastry but my experience with this danish was sublime; I will try again in the future.

A few days ago I got a notification on my NHS app and I assumed it was the app letting me know they’ve updated their terms and conditions. But when I opened the notification it was my GP informing me that I should make an appointment for a pap smear test. I took this extremely personally. A pap smear is something adults get, it marks the start of the never-ending admin of getting older and the compound upkeep of monitoring your body’s deterioration until death. I want no part of it. That’s not for me, surely? I’m only twenty-four. While I don’t fancy the idea of rubber gloves and a swab mashing around in my cervix, it’s not the procedure that I’m upset about. First and foremost, I don’t want anymore on my to-do list. It’s another thing that I’ll push back again and again sitting there for months waiting to be done. Its unchecked presence will loom and swallow me whole, reminding me constantly that a better more put-together person would have made the appointment at the notification’s first bleep. When I finally do go, it’ll feel like a waste of my youth. I’ll sit in the doctor’s reception sneezing from the smell of disinfectant wondering what more fun people are doing this weekend instead of getting a cold speculum shoved up inside them. The smear confronts me with being practically in my mid-twenties and I hate that I feel so unremarkable, poor, and I’m not even half as funny as I’d like to be. 

Like most other teenage girls I kept an inconsistent and slap-dash diary between eleven and thirteen. I came across it during a clear out over Christmas and recognised instantly the binding I’d obliterated from ripping out pages of a book and hiding my scrappy diary between the covers. The whole thing had a nightmarish look, like something you find buried deep in the basement of a horror movie, it had an atmosphere of mutilation. I flipped through the fragments of passages and stopped when I read one page which said ‘By the time I’m twenty-three I’m sure I will have turned down a few marriage proposals’. Initially, it made me laugh thinking how silly I was and, now that I’m older, I know few people are thinking about marriage that young. But it has stuck with me and the more I think about it the more I don’t think my thirteen-year-old self was saying that I wanted to be married at twenty-three. I think I imagined I would be so grown up and amazing by then that everyone would want to marry me. Now I’m here and nothing quite matches up how I thought. I didn’t realise that being in your mid-twenties is an ongoing cycle of feeling burnt out from doing too much while simultaneously self-loathing for resting because ‘ these are your best years’. On top of that, I’m never going to be more attractive than I am now and I’m wasting my plump skin and shiny hair by lying in bed all weekend with the blinds drawn. I think maybe when you zoom out and look down at the bare bones it does match up to the expectation. However, when you zoom in to all the nitty gritty you see that I forgot to brush my teeth for a whole day last week, that I don’t exercise enough, and that I have a good job on paper but actually I can’t afford to put my heating on for too long. Now I’m pap smear age and I’m writing this dehydrated in bed under a bundle of blankets while my fingers stiffen with cold on the keyboard and I’m so tired. 

I’m trying not to indulge myself too much – ironic after all that, I know. Self-pity can be alluring but it has to have an end. I’m not ready to go and get it but I am pap smear age and I’m trying to be okay with that. Soon I’ll be going to the opticians to check in on my cataracts, followed by a stop into the audiologist to get my hearing aids turned up, then I’ll hobble back to the care home where I’ll have so much muscle ache the nurses will have to stretch out my legs as I sit in a chair and yelp, and finally I’ll forget all of this with my dementia. If that’s the flow of the river, I can’t fight it. What a sweet little life. 

Goodbye for now.