Let’s all meet up in the year 2017
Won’t it be strange when we’re all fully grown? MP Stella Creasy staged a teen reunion to celebrate her 40th birthday
Whenever I’m asked what advice I would give young campaigners, the inner teenager in my head sarcastically laughs, surprised anyone would think me a role model – or even an adult. Imposter syndrome can get the best of any of us, no matter what we do or how long we have been doing it. Yet it took a recent trip down memory lane to remind me that becoming a grown-up isn’t about liking gardening, afternoon TV or giving guidance to others. It’s about becoming comfortable enough in your own skin to know you’re good as you are.
Like most people, I was an awkward teenager. I fidgeted constantly, dressed in plaid and obsessively followed jangly guitar bands to have something to talk about in social situations. There was no Facebook, no email, no Snapchat, not even Friends Reunited. Music came on CDS not Spotify or Youtube, hair was floppy not styled and you didn’t ‘Netflix and chill’ – you went to Blockbusters and borrowed a video. But talk to 18-year-olds now and it’s still the same story – the angst that made being young seem like a constant confidence battle is still instantly recognisable.
That’s why I shall always value those who were with me as it happened. For me, the summer of 1995 is drenched in golden memories. We were a motley crew of eight girls and boys, all of us freshly graduated from school but yet to leave our provincial Essex town. We could have travelled, written our first novels or learned a new skill. Expanded our horizons and constructively challenged our minds and bodies. Of course, instead we spent those precious sunny days hungover, snogging and hanging out at the beach.
We were in-betweeners. Neither the cool kids nor total nerds. Our friendships were cemented by the inevitable coupling up (spoiler – that was my fault), but strong enough to also weather the inevitable break-ups and recoupling (again, spoiler – those were my fault, too). This Life was on telly but it had nothing on our ability to make everything a drama – and fun. Turning up in dinner jackets and ball gowns to the village pub, blaring the theme from Shaft down the high street out of the car windows, stupidly doing acrobatics while drunk late at night and parading the bruises afterwards.
At the end of that summer, we sat by the sea one final morning to sober up and celebrate the last of us turning 18, mulling over our imminent departures to pastures new – some straight to university, others exploring Europe, and me determined not to be left behind in Colchester. None of us could have known it would be 22 years before we would all be together in the same place at
the same time again. The conversation turned to that most faraway place – being 40 – the time by which it was presumed we would be ‘grown-ups’.
I left our hometown two weeks later and never looked back, headed to London and a whole new life. I learned to touch type so I could earn £2 more an hour than a receptionist, and thus have the financial freedom to volunteer part-time in politics. Yet, over the years that followed, I’ve kept a photo of that last day with friends on the beach. Pinned to my wall at university, framed on my kitchen wall in my first flat and now sitting on my desk in Parliament. It is a memento of the moment my friends decided I would become an MP. Looking back, they saw what my self-conscious teenage mind could not fathom – the inevitability that a stubborn young teen who caused havoc for teachers with campaigns and difficult questions to visiting politicians would end up being one herself.
This year, as we all turned 40, I stared at it on my desk one late night in Westminster and it seemed inconceivable not to commemorate our teenage fortune-telling by going back to Aldeburgh beach – if only to clarify how on earth we ended up with those haircuts and fashion choices.
We’ve all kept in touch through the years, off and on. We are now parents, MPS, partners in major companies, married, moved on. But whatever we have done since, we all admitted the same brutal question nagging at our inner teenager. Out of our peer group, who are the ‘wildly successful’, envy-inducing ones, and who could otherwise be left feeling like a failure? In short, who could show they had passed the test for being a grown-up?
Several pints – then pizza and more beer – later, we were back to our old selves. Of course, the banter was now a feast of middle-aged moaning. What had happened to school friends of times past? Should we still answer to our childhood nicknames? Why doesn’t modern music have choruses? Could we do the same physical things we used to do (culminating in an admittedly drunken attempt to recreate stunt rolls over a sea wall on to a pebbled beach – still not to be recommended at any age)? Gorgeous pictures of the kids my friends now have, coupled with realising which of their parents – those patient people who had ferried us to parties, cleared up our clutter and provided us with tea – had passed away, only reinforced how the passage of time is both sweet and sad.
Getting older doesn’t mean losing touch with your teenage dreams – or nightmares. Sure, waistlines and hair lengths change, but scratch the surface and most of us still harbour the remnants of our adolescence, good and bad. I can still catch myself feeling tongue-tied when I first meet people, and I don’t feel I’ve lost any of my energy for injustice or the pranks that made me such a character for my school friends. And yet inevitably we are different. Older, more reflective, aware of time, of the desire to really make something of ourselves now we are adult enough to admit our ambitions. But we are also more content and confident, too; 22 years have given us the ability to laugh at ourselves now, and then, rather than to overanalyse and obsess. To understand our inner in-betweener characters, rather than be driven by them.
The next day, I returned to the blurry photo. Had that plucky young girl actually come to someone like me for advice on what on earth to do with her life, I know she wouldn’t have taken it – or needed it. I could see now what we never acknowledged at the time – we were just starting out and so life didn’t need to be perfect to be exciting. It should have made me feel sad that we had worried so much about how we looked or what we’d do next, too often letting that overpower our enjoyment of a unique time of such freedom and possibility. But instead, I just feel so grateful to have started my attempts at being a grown-up side by side with a bunch of people who have made it so memorable and been cheering me on ever since.
When you are young and self-absorbed, becoming middle-aged seems something to be feared; a time by which you should be in control of what you’re doing with your life, otherwise you are ancient and past it. With good people around to love you, that fear changes to anticipation rather than panic. They help you see how much you’ve already done and how much more you can do. I can’t wait to return to the beach in the coming years to discuss the next chapters of our lives – perhaps by then, we’ll finally remember to give late night stunt rolls a miss.