I can’t wait to grow up (2002)

I had quite a heavy quarter-life crisis when I was 26-28 years old. This is when I realized that a lot of my heroes that I’d looked up to, and aspired to be like ‘when I grew up’, were younger than me. This is when I realized all of those things I was hoping to achieve ‘when I grew up’, weren’t going to happen. I wasn’t going to be a professional skateboarder – heck, I wasn’t even that good; I wasn’t going to be a professional surfer; or a deep sea diver; I wasn’t going to be a wushu master, or a capoeira expert; I wasn’t going to be able to run up walls and triple flip off them; and I definitely wasn’t going to space. Instead, the world was full of nastiness, and everyone around me was depressed, on medication, and/or in therapy with similar realizations of their own. And I realized, this is it. This is life. This is what we were so looking forward to as kids.

(In those days I didn’t even know that there was such a thing as a ‘quarter life crisis’. Growing up we heard about the ‘mid-life crisis’ from films etc, but we didn’t hear about the quarter life crisis. Only many years later did I learn that this was ‘a thing’).