Karly

Eighteen years ago I was ten, going on eleven, and my wants were both extremely specific and completely unhelpful to my future. I wanted High School Musical merch, Hannah Montana merch, and the kind of glossy tween accessories that promised a life I had not yet lived. I also wanted my grandma’s gallbladder surgery to go well and I wanted my grandfather not to have a heart attack, which feels like a lot to be carrying when you still think chocolate-stained leggings could ruin your life.

I was reminded of all this because I rewatched Fever Pitch and there’s a scene that is, frankly, far too intense for what is technically a romcom. Paul says he’s wanted Arsenal to win for eighteen years, and Sarah says if she still wanted the same things she’d think she’d gone wrong, and it was one of those throwaway lines that lands like a small moral instruction, lightly delivered, quietly brutal.

Because the truth is that it is not embarrassing to have wanted things, even when the things were silly, and it is not embarrassing to have been small and earnest and completely unequipped for the scale of the world. What’s embarrassing is pretending you never wanted anything in the first place, pretending you sprang into adulthood fully formed, with refined taste and stable emotions, like some kind of self-actualised Ikea purchase.

I didn’t even think about university at ten. I didn’t think about moving away, living in another language, or building a life where my inner world would become my work. I couldn’t see it, not because I lacked imagination, but because ten-year-olds aren’t meant to have a five-year plan. They’re meant to survive their own bodies, the awkwardness of growing, and the strange little panics you only get when you’re that age, like the day I stained my light blue leggings with chocolate and my mother asked if I’d got my first period. I was mortified in a way that made perfect sense then, and makes me laugh now, because periods are not moral events. They’re just one more thing the body does loudly, whether you’re ready or not.

At twenty-eight, my wants are less merch-based, although I still have the same weakness for objects that promise comfort and identity. I still want aesthetic things. I want a slightly smaller body sometimes, because I live in a world that tells women their bodies are public property, and I am not immune to the desire to be left alone. I want my work to be read. I want to build Nonsense & Lit into the kind of platform that feels like a magazine you can live inside, girlypop LRB, a place where language and culture and obsession are allowed to sit at the same table.

But I also want softer things now. I want calm. I want to stop living in a constant brace position, waiting for somebody else’s mood to decide what kind of day I’m allowed to have. I want to be able to want things without apologising for them.

And maybe that’s what the Sarah line was really about. Not that you must abandon your old dreams to prove you’ve matured, but that growth is, in part, the ability to update your desires without feeling like you’ve betrayed your younger self. Ten-year-old me wanted proof that life could be bright and safe and fun. She wanted reassurance, she wanted her family to be okay, she wanted to be normal and she wanted to be loved without conditions.

I’m still trying to give her that, just in more adult packaging.