Twenty Five

It feels a little bit narcissistic to do a blog post on your own birthday. But that’s exactly what I’m doing, and I feel like there’s good reason for it.

For a lot of people, your 25th birthday is already significant enough. You now have to select a whole different option when a survey asks you, ”What age range are you in?”. You’re coming to the end of your time using the 16-25 Railcard. You’ve also made it a quarter of a century, which is pretty significant!

For me, 25 is special because it’s the age that, as a child, I couldn’t really imagine myself reaching. Not in a dark way or anything, but I literally could not imagine myself as an adult, I couldn’t imagine myself getting to middle age, or even retiring. It just wasn’t something I could fathom. In hindsight, this was almost 100% a symptom of my long time gender dysphoria that had always been there but I hadn’t picked up on.

A side effect of this was that it was just really, really hard to conceptualise my future and my goals, and where I wanted to be as an adult. Like, I imagined making it to university and maybe graduating? But beyond that, crickets. But I guess I can kinda think about my future now?

So, I don’t know, feels like, every year from now is a gift, and by god am I going to treat them like a gift.

Also this is the first birthday where people have been calling me Maisie and referring to me as she or they. So that’s pretty awesome.