She's A Tomboy

I don’t know who wrote the script, exactly, but somehow we all received a copy.

Married by your late twenties. A career that had found its shape by thirty. Children, ideally finished having them, well before your body or your patience ran out. Your thirties spent thriving; the good years, the ones people mean when they say “she’s got it together.” Early retirement whispered about somewhere in your forties, if you’d done everything right.

Nobody handed us this in writing. We absorbed it anyway, from our parents’ lives, half-understood, from the culture around us, from the specific tyranny of watching other people’s timelines and mistaking them for a universal one. And then we got here. Late thirties. Forties. And the room looks nothing like the one we were shown in the brochure.

Some of us are thriving, genuinely. Some of us are between jobs, and it’s been longer than we’re comfortable saying out loud. Some are newly divorced, doing the strange math of rebuilding a life at an age we thought would be spent settled. Some are quietly, privately negotiating with infertility, a subject nobody scripted for us at all. The retirement we once joked about is not early for many of us; given what we’ve watched happen to our own parents’ pensions, it isn’t even guaranteed to be comfortable. We are not where the script said we’d be. And most of us have been carrying a quiet, unspoken shame about that gap, as if it were a personal failure rather than the simple, unremarkable truth that scripts are fiction and lives are not.

Here is what I think is actually happening, underneath all of it. We are not disappointed because our lives went wrong. We are disoriented because they went differently, on a timeline nobody actually agreed to, toward a version of ourselves we were told to expect and never quite met. Disappointment says something broke. Disorientation is closer to the truth: we’re standing in a life that is real, often good, occasionally hard, and it simply does not match the map.

We’re standing in a life that is real but simply does not match the map.

And I think this is where the nostalgia comes in . The countryside, the slow mornings, the 90s needle drops, the 80s colour palettes creeping back into everything we build and wear and decorate our homes with. We call it a trend. I don’t think it’s a trend. I think it’s a form of reaching backward for the last stretch of time that felt like it belonged to us cleanly. Before the script started running late, before “on track” became a phrase we flinched at. The slow life isn’t really about the countryside. It’s about wanting a version of time that isn’t graded against a deadline we never set.

None of this is a call to grieve the script. It’s an invitation to retire it. The version of adulthood we’re actually living- messier, less synchronized, occasionally requiring us to parent our own parents while still figuring out our own careers, occasionally arriving at thriving ten years later than the brochure promised- is not a lesser version. It’s simply the one that’s real, and it deserves to be written about with the same seriousness we once gave the fictional one.

This is what this space is for now. She’s A Tomboy; she’s still in here, still opinionated, still slightly amused by convention. This is the same voice, aged into the years the brochure never covered — writing toward the adulthood we’re actually living, not the one we were promised.

This is the Evolution.

Rael