I’m only 24 but I can feel my youth slipping away

character Zooey Deschanel plays, to every advert with a blonde 20-something running through sunflowers after eating a diet yoghurt.

This idea that we should stay light and carefree forever isn’t new. We already tell women that we decrease in value as we age; this is just an extension of that. But the expectation I should stay mentally the way I was at 18 is about as impossible as staying the way I looked at 18.

It’s probably harder, because there’s no Botox for your brain.

The problem is that this lightness we idolise is the stuff that comes naturally to young, middleclass girls who nothing has really happened to.

And when life happens to us, we inevitably lose it.

(Obviously if you’ve grown up desperately poor, or trans, or abused, then you probably already know heaviness. But society tends to write off those people as damaged goods and only laments the loss of innocence in the ‘‘normal’’ girls like me.)

I don’t need to explain the classic coming-of-age struggles. Some people learn early on how awful the world can be, but most middle-class kids learn between 18 and 25 when they leave home and see the world. And that causes heaviness in everyone.

But there’s an added stab in the guts for young women. Our school system largely tells girls that we’re equal to men and can do anything if we just work hard enough. I left school believing we had a post-sexist society. Now at 24, when me and my friends have all been harassed, attacked or in abusive relationships, I know the huge gap between expectation and reality.

We all have stories of abuse, we all have a #metoo story and we all know someone in a dangerous relationship. You realise the statistics that were once harrowingly theoretical are actually reality for you, your friend, your sister. The scale of the problems, the memories of pain, the sense of frustration at your inability to change anything . . . it weighs you down.

What’s worse is that you don’t get a chance to forget, because daily life for women is putting up with a lot of tiny shitty things that remind you. Things like a catcall, which wouldn’t bother me of itself, can now drag me back into dark burning memories. We can’t ‘‘lighten up’’ when someone tells a rape joke. It’s not a joke. It’s just like that time at that supposed friend’s party . . .

So yes, you get angry, because anger is a natural reaction to pain. Everyone gets angry – but men are allowed to be angry in a way we aren’t. Sorry Jeep dude, I can’t be a sexy child forever.

Yes, I can feel that teenage lightness slipping away. Yes, maybe I’m frustrated. No, I’m not lamenting it. I want to embrace it.

Maybe I’ll use my frustration to change the world.