Tasha Dhanraj on the joys of young adulthood

I’m 18! I’m 18! Look at me! I can drink legally! I can get a credit card! I can buy knives! Wow, being 18 is dangerous. Maybe this is the government’s way of population control – like Logan’s Run, but with more passive methods.

So far, being 18 has been thoroughly uninspiring. I haven’t been ID’d, I haven’t voted for anything and I haven’t woken up in a gutter surrounded by my own vomit. In some ways, I’m glad those things haven’t happened, but at the moment I don’t feel like I’m doing the “18 thing” properly.

“I am wasting my time wondering whether I am being 18 correctly”

I have been behaving myself far too much. Instead of embracing the liberty and legality side of coming of age, I have been living up to my adult status. My first legal drink was while having a nice meal with my parents, before absorbing some culture at the theatre. Then, the next night I found myself in a pub with people buying me drinks all evening and I still chose to have less than two pints and leave in time for the last train home. I have been a complete square.

Yesterday, my boyfriend and I spent the day in London together. We went to a bar where he ordered an £18 cocktail – one pound for every year I’d been alive. It was a drink with such a high alcohol content that they call it ‘The Zombie’ after what you become once you’ve drunk it. I, on the other hand, had one that tasted of pineapple and had less alcohol in it than a capful of mouthwash.

I don’t really know what I was hoping would happen when I became 18. There was an element of me thinking that I would suddenly get this new-found awareness of my responsibility in life and I would start looking into interest rates on mortgages and I would actually bother to work out what APR means. I’m the same though. I was never that big on drinking and I have always been excited by things that taste of pineapple.

I think the truth is, being 18 doesn’t make me an adult and I shouldn’t start searching for things to make me feel like I am. I am wasting my time wondering whether I am being 18 correctly and I should just appreciate this window while I am still technically an adult, but don’t have to worry about the other burdens that come with it. I’m still a child and I would like to be treated as one.