Spoiled (written in March)

“You are so spoiled,” my boyfriend told me.

With him, I was always spoiled for some reason or another, for living in the “rich” suburbs (instead of the regular suburbs like his ass), for having non-divorced parents (even though I always wanted my mom to get a divorce), for celebrating my birthday the entire month of April (it wasn’t like I was getting presents every day, and anyway he was just salty ‘cause his dad was a Jehovah‘s Witness.)

I couldn’t help the fact that I was excited about turning sixteen.  Every birthday brought me one year closer to THE birthday, eighteen.  Now my little sister is about to turn eighteen and I’m just shaking my head at how fast… but now I’m really sounding like I’m old.

The fact is, I will be twenty-one soon and I’m not exactly thrilled.

I just don’t look forward to birthdays like I used to, which isn’t to say that the last two were disappointing.  My nineteenth birthday was great.  I was in NYC for a writing workshop and I even managed to meet a super hot guy while walking from the train station.  My twentieth was good in one of those regular-day sort of ways.  I applied for a job at Applebee’s which I did not get, ate some cake, and got into a confrontation with this walrus-looking chick.

But society seems to frown on twenty-one being just a regular day, and unless I get some kind of unexpected cash flow (note to self: buy scratch-off at work today) a trip to San Diego, Vegas, or New York is out of the question.

Which means that in all likelihood, someone’s gonna offer to take me to the bar and I’m gonna say no.  1.) Because I used to earn a living hanging around bars so the thought of doing it for recreation kind of seems like making Jr. Whoppers ‘for fun’ or recreationally washing dishes.  2.) Because I don’t drink.

At all. 

I sometimes think that seeing alcoholism at a young age saved my life.  I didn’t have to be one of those young girls who drink too much, smoke too much, pop too many pills, and then end up dead at 21 from an overdose or paralyzed at eighteen from flipping their car while high.  I decided when I was very young that I wasn’t going to drink or do drugs… it seemed like saying ‘no’ altogether was the only way, because my father should have known to limit himself since his own father was an alcoholic, but he didn’t.

And now sometimes I think I missed out on a whole chapter of young adulthood because I’m the boring girl who doesn’t drink and won’t even smoke unless it’s a very, very special circumstance (I would probably be a total weed-head but another family member is schizophrenic, the only other thing I was terrified of becoming, so I just say no to that, too.)

But then I remind myself that I’m lucky.  I’m not Chanel, snorting Oxy’s because there were no addicts around her growing up to show her just how possible becoming addicted is, and I’m not Jordan, putting pills up her nose because she grew up surrounded by so many users, no one showed her that it was possible to live any other way.  I wish there were more lucky ones like me, living long enough to see curses turn into blessings, with minds clear enough to understand that every blessing brings a responsibility.  So I’ve gotta let someone else take my birthday shot for me (the sexy New Yorker did the honors when I was turning nineteen.)  I’ve gotta try my best to live a happy, healthy, substance-fee adulthood for myself, but also for the people like my mom, who were busy trying to hold things together, and people like Jordan, who were lost long before they were legal.

Maybe that teenage boyfriend was right.  Maybe I am spoiled.