Goodness me I'm almost thirty-three.

Goodness me I’m almost thirty-three.

Another birthday and what looks like being another shit faux-summer day with a teenager for a temperature #forfuckssake

But putting the weather aside for a moment, I’m excited about 33. I definitely prefer the odd numbers but beyond that, it feels like a good age, a good moment. It’s not 34-and-my-god-your-reproductive-window-is-now-officially-waning and it’s not 30-my-god-you’re-twenties-are-over. I think it’s my new Barbie age.

If only my Barbie age hadn’t been 27.

Barbie age, WTF you ask? You know, your Barbie age, the age you imagined that eponymous blonde to be when you were young enough to play with her (before body dysmorphia and high fashion peek-a-boo crop tops entered your conscious existence…)

It’s the age at which Barbie, with her hugely successful polymorphous career as a doctor-astronaut-Olympic dressage champion, also had the dream house, the dream car and dreamy Ken in his dreamy Hawaiian shirt. It’s when Barbie had her shit together and was generally just FABULOUS and Fabulously Grown Up.

When I turned 27 I was working three part-time jobs, had $500 in superannuation, no Ken, no art collection, a shitty fucking rust-ridden Corolla and a rented apartment on Bondi Beach with the world’s worst kitchen and a drug dealer across the hallway. Which was all fine, sort of.

The tipping point came several days later while watching a documentary on wildlife in China and realising that I would probably pass my whole life and then die without ever having cuddled a baby panda. Yes, seriously, that was what broke me.

I mean, I’ll never go to the moon and I probably won’t get around to learning how to drive a manual either, I’ll never truly understand how the Internet works and I’ll sooner have a lobotomy than vote for the Australian Liberal Party but all that, somehow, I’m ok with. But no baby pandas? Just say ‘abject failure’ and get it over with.

Which is why I think, if I had my time again, I’d make 33 my Barbie age.

I still don’t have the pink convertible or the dream house with optional Jacuzzi but I have my dream Ken, some pretty nice shoes, enough great friends to form a kick-ass band, a job I adore, an imminent book and nearly $3000 in my superannuation.

Freshly baked birthday cupcakes courtesy of the Dream Husband

But beyond all that richness, I have a contentment that’s eluded me until 33. Fuck, don’t get me wrong, I’m still an over-thinking, highly sensitive nightmare but I feel (largely) at peace with that part of myself, aware of the good things that come from it also. And I have a genuine appreciation of where I’ve been and what I’ve learned, which is, that fundamentally most fuck ups are imminently fixable.

But beyond even all THAT, I seem to have acquired with 33 the most fabulously liberating sense of no longer really giving a shit if I’m cool or not.

Which by definition now makes me properly cool, yes? Yes?....