Oh my god. How did this happen? One day I was 22 and awkward, then I was 28 and looking good, and then, like my life was stuck on the fast forward button, I woke up this morning, two weeks away from my 31st birthday, sick as a dog, with new eye wrinkles wedging their way through my face. ​What’s that all about?

In the last three years, there has been a dramatic and drastic shift in my life in relation to how people see me and how I am treated. Seriously, one day, I was young and fresh, and the next…not so much. Here are some things that have changed, and not necessarily for the better:

• Up until a few years ago I was ALWAYS carded. Sometimes double carded. Now, the odd time when I do get carded I say ‘thank you’ and then go home and kiss my moisturizer bottle for actually working that day. Apparently years of sunbathing and sunburns actually DO catch up with you.

• Young dudes don’t even look at me anymore. Not that I want them to, but this has changed drastically. In June, a few of us were driving to Collingwood to go to a bachelorette looking mighty cute, when a car full of young bucks drove past us. Not one of them looked at us. Not. One. It was sad. It was especially sad when we realized that they didn’t look at us because all they saw was a car full of old birds instead of hot b-tches. It wasn’t as though we really wanted their attention, and if we had of caught their eye we would have laughed at the fact that the young boys checked us out, it’s just that they didn’t even glance our way. Ugh. How did this happen?
• So, I guess that means we’re cougars, because for a moment we actually wanted the young’ns to look at us. UGH. We can’t win. In fact, we probably are considered cougars to 22 year olds and younger. I remember when we were 19 and our friend Grant was dating a cougar…she was 26. TWENTY SIX. That statistic makes me a cougar + 5.

• Mam. Excuse me mam. Mam can I help you. Mam? Mam? Mam. If one more person calls me mam, I’m going to lose it.
• I work with people born in the 90′s who refer to Beyonce’s Crazy In Love as ‘old school’. That shit’s not old school. It just came out. Really, the fact that people born in the 90′s have full time careers blows my mind. Like actually blows it. I just blew up. I realize that this point isn’t really about how I’ve been treated, but it’s more of a WTF.

OK, so 31 isn’t that old. It’s not really old at all. But technically I’m a full blown grown-up, and children think I’m ancient. However, now that I’ve accepted the fact that I’m significantly older than Lucinda Nicholson (the married ‘older’ woman that Brandon Walsh has an affair with), I need to go home and exfoliate. If you don’t know that reference, then clearly you didn’t watch enough 90210 growing up. Not the next gen 90210, but the real one.