Teenage Life and Death

As of the tenth of August, I was twenty. I did very little to actually celebrate that fact, most of my celebrating for the week was done from midnight Saturday onwards. The better part of my night had been spent partying, while enjoying endless lines being cut by an OCD hooker, some of which were snorted off risque regions of said sex worker and her friend.
So I found myself twenty, younger than most people mistake me for, and in the rare case, older. Eliza, Dorothy and Galahad all told me the night before that I occasionally presented myself as being around the eighteen years old mark. I asked Galahad later and he described it more eloquently. There is a point in your life that you look back on and you think to yourself, that's how I was then. The 'then' in question is the point in my life that I found myself at on the dawn of my twentieth birthday. While I usually come across as older than I am, I sometimes did things that seemed immature or oblivious, which threw people, until they find out how old I really am.
At first this notion caused me pause for concern, but after some thought I realized I wasn't just happy with the arrangement, but I also understand why it is I found myself acting this way.
Hopefully I don't sound too self-pitying, pretentious or full of myself when I say this, but I didn't have the chance to enjoy my teenage years like most adolescents. While other children my age were learning to drink, date, drive, party and fornicate, I was dealing with other fun things like serious mental illness and dangerous eating disorders. I was never really in much of a state for a social life. My peers had the option of pushing their boundaries and finding their limits, while mine were forced upon me for my own sanity and safety. In fact, outside of school I have almost no memories from my teenage years.
The upshot of this is that I had the chance to learn more about myself and my limits than I would have if I'd taken the conventional route. I achieved by seventeen what takes most people many years more. Not a road I would have taken optionally, but the outcome is that I do find myself more mature and responsible than I would otherwise be, if only out of necessity.
So now, free from home, and healthy in my head once more, I had the chance to do all of the wild and crazy things I'd never done, but on a scale not available to my schoolyard chums. Now I was twenty, I could act at last like I was eighteen. So should I want to party all night, snort lines from a hooker's snatch, fake my own death or dance like noones watching and sing like noone's listening in general, then I would.
And I did. I was twenty.
And I was determined that it would not be a year that I was going to forget in a hurry...

Yours,
Titus T.