27 is the age of 'what next?'

Friday, 6 April 2018

You let go of a lot of your insecurities at 27, but not all of them, writes Britt Mann.

Why do we speak of life as if it's a race? On the cusp of her 27th birthday Britt Mann has no car, no boyfriend, no house and no cat. But she's on track.

When I wake up this Friday I will be 27 and my dad will be 60. (My great-grandma, who shares our birthday, will still be dead.)

I'll be waking up in a 10-year-old double bed in a 90-year-old wooden house worth $1.35 million. The house has four bedrooms and four flatmates. It has one toilet, two refrigerators, and 37 indoor plants.

At 8am I'll walk 30 minutes to the newsroom – a path I've trodden twice a day, five days a week for 18 months. This is the fourth job I've had with this company, which is on its second name, in the fourth city I've lived in in 10 years.

**READ MORE

Britt Mann may not own a house but she has a home with three flatmates and 37 plants.

* Film maker David Farrier on being 35

* The age of 17 brings happiness and nostalgia for Emma Gadsby

* Novelist Emily Perkins on being 48**

People are in the habit of asking me: 'What next?' I sometimes respond that I've peaked too soon. Fifteen years ago, I was ripping off the covers of Sunday magazine and tacking them to my bedroom wall. Be careful what you wish for, I guess.

I've been asked that question, or variations on it, since I was capable of coherent conversation. What do you want to do, what do you want to be? I was such a miserable teenager that making it out of high school in one piece seemed a lofty goal in itself. It was the height of the emo era and I was fond of slashing my thighs with broken glass. My favourite movie was Girl, Interrupted. I'm rolling my eyes writing that.

At lunchtime, I'd eat mesclun salad doused in Paul Newman dressing in my '96 Nissan March, named Steve after the Crocodile Hunter. I'd try not to retch on bitter leaves turned slimy in my schoolbag. Being thin was more important than being full. And the worst part was I wasn't even thin.

Once hospitalised for binge drinking, Britt Mann now consumes alcohol with a classy restraint.

When I hear about kids working themselves into a lather over attaining 'excellences' in NCEA, I'm dispirited. Being a tortured teen is hard enough without killing yourself to get superfluously high grades. When you're a grown-up, or a convincing approximation of one, you'll realise all that mattered was passing.

The question of what to do or be persists into university. I enrolled in law, thinking it was the only professional degree available for the artsy-inclined. I barely passed the first year course. I gained a politics degree without incident, then enrolled in Peace & Conflict Studies, and got a tattoo of a dove. I went on to study public health, and felt frustrated at what I considered to be a patronising focus on binge drinking. That year on my 22nd birthday, I awoke in Dunedin Hospital's emergency department wearing a gypsy costume covered in spew. The attending doctor was in my epidemiology class. I struggled to admit I'd become a scarfie statistic.

Five years later, people are still asking. Not a week into my then-new job, someone inquired what I wanted to do next. Is it any wonder Millennials are restless? We're programmed to obsess about the future and panic when we don't have plans.

I'm 'behind' my peers in some ways and in front in others. On the one hand, I have a fun job with fun people who let me write fun things. On the other hand, I have no car, house, boyfriend, or cat.

I can attend a movie or a party or a restaurant alone, without shame. But I still worry about my body. I messed up my metabolism and mindset with those nauseating salads to the extent my BMI is now in a range where a nurse will half-heartedly mention it during a smear appointment. Lady, I've spent 15 years dwelling on that arbitrary, life-ruining number. And yes, I'm aware feminists like me aren't supposed to admit that.

I have friends who are on their second degrees, second careers, second children. I don't know why we speak of life as if it's a race. If it is, who wants to be first to the finish line? I know people not much older than me for whom things haven't worked out how they expected. It's hard to comfort someone mourning for what they wanted and didn't get. Sometimes it's a quiet dismay, divulged only when rinsed in alcohol and ready to go home. Sometimes it is a wear-it-on-your-face, hear-it-through-the-wall grief, a ledge they won't be talked down from. I worry they planned too far ahead, expected too much of themselves, were afraid to fail and never tried. I worry they won't forgive themselves for things they did and things they didn't. I worry I might one day feel this way.

At 27, I am as sure of my convictions as I am unfazed by the possibility I might change my mind about them. I'm not interested in having kids – they are mostly bad-mannered and entirely bad for the environment – but then, neither was my mother and she had two.

Nor am I interested in home-ownership, perhaps for different reasons. An Auckland property developer in his 70s recently asked me whether I planned on ever buying a house.

'I spend a third of my take-home pay on rent,' I replied with a smile. 'How do you propose I go about doing that?' I am at peace with being a long-term renter for the same reasons I'm at peace with being single: it seems precarious to predicate my happiness on something out of my control, or, more accurately, settle for something unideal just to tick the box.

Asking a kid about their future plans is to engage in a futile thought experiment. That kid is going to have a multitude of jobs before she retires or Jesus returns – whichever comes first. Most of these jobs will have undecipherable titles. Plenty won't have been invented yet. She will spend years toiling at jobs even her closest family members are incapable of comprehending, beyond: 'It's something to do with computers.' As a journalist, I'm an anomaly. It's a self-explanatory noun with a long, globalised history. It's pretty much the same as what you see in the movies only with less yelling and better outfits.

Maybe people ask kids what they want to do because they're unsure of how to otherwise talk to an alien being. God help you if you become embroiled in a conversation about the present or the past. They might tell you some alarming anecdote about eating slimy salad alone in a car.

NB: Unlike the other writers in this Age Special, Britt Mann wasn't in our 2005 edition. Back then she was a teenager, living in Christchurch and dreaming of being a journalist. Now she's living the dream… Kind of.