Day154 - Twenty-One

 TWENTY-ONE

Prompt - Twenty-One : Write about your 21st birthday

Sounds like the Westminster powers that be are already planning a big fuss over Queenie's 'Platinum' jubilee, which I think is meant to mark seventy years of one unelected individual having significant power and influence over the rest of us.  Not something to celebrate when you think about it that way, but that won't stop those who rule us and want the status quo maintained, since it benefits them and their wealthy pals.  

And as human beings we do love to fetishise dates.  Birthdays, anniversaries, arbitrary numbers of days marking this that and the next thing.  Specific days of the year named after past events, whether imaginary or not.  They can be useful as ways of marking the passing of time, and our changes in life, be that personal or societal, but it does get carried too far for much of the time.  And sometimes the significance given to particular numbers can work against those who don't experience the same pleasures that are allegedly attached to certain events.  Like xmas.

This train of thought was put in motion by today's writing prompt, which asked me to write abut my twenty first birthday.  Turning 21 was once considered the point of 'coming of age', another arbitrary marker that paid no attention to the reality of individual lives.  I guess the subject was chosen because, convention says, we are supposed to have particularly memories of that one event in our life.  We'd have had a party or a night out or some incredible shared experience that would remain a fond recollection for the rest of our life.  That fantasy was not the reality for me, not, I suspect, for many, many other people.

When asked to recall that single day, just over forty four years ago, there were two positives came to mind.  I was given a very nice Omega watch as my main present (it stopped working many years ago, but is on my wall in a small display of some of my old watches), and dinner was one of my mother's special salads, my favourite meal at the time.  But what else happened?  What was my state of mind.  I had no solid memory of the day to hold on to, so I went back to my diary entry of the time.

Right enough, there was the watch and the nice meal (what we had wasn't written down, but I do have a genuine memory of what it would have consisted of), but they were pretty much the only good bits.  A few other presents I seem to have liked, and being in my room listening to LPs are the other high points.  But as for the rest...

No friends, because I didn't have any.  No party, no going out.  The latter probably at my request.  To this day I usually prefer a good meal at home to one in a restaurant.  The only people involved were my parents, and my mother's elderly aunt, who had been more of a granny figure to me than either of my actual grandmothers.  I spent a lot of the time on my own, from preference.  And the one interchange that gets a mention is a long talk with my mum, where she told me how difficult I was to live with because I was so sullen and uninvolved in everything (at least that's what I conclude from the sketchy description available to me today).  But I also wrote that I wasn't entirely honest with her, never mentioning the times when I contemplated suicide.  That was something I had largely forgotten about.

Looking back it's clear that, if the same had been happening today, there's a good chance i would have been diagnosed with low level depression.  But this was the seventies and we didn't think that way back then.  So I had what was really happening behind this sullen mask I wore, and tried to get through what was going on in my head.  There was nobody to talk to except my mother, and our relationship was frequently ropey.  The diary shows we had a blazing row two days after the birthday.  It wasn't a unique occurence...

So I have sympathy for anyone who's told that should be out having a good time because they are eighteen, or twenty one, or whatever, on some particular day.  Better to strive to accept people for who they are, and who they are happiest being, than try to force them into a 'special' modd just because the calendar lands on one set of numbers.   

A few days ago Naomi Osaka said she wouldn't talk to the press at the French Open, for the sake of her mental health.  She subsequently withdrew from the tournament, as her statement was becoming more reported than the actual tennis.  The usual suspect, like the vile Piers Morgan, have given her a hard time for this.  I'm with Naomi, and I hope more will speak out in her defence.  We can't go on forcing people to be who we want them to.  Let everyone be themselves.