I am lunching on a slab of chocolate. A slab! Morevor one containing strawberries and cookies and meringue. I'm not sure that can be topped.

For most of my life (thanks to starting and finishing school earlier than my peers) I have been the youngest, feeling one step behind everyone, out of sync as though I was perpetually racing ahead to catch up with the longer legged. I'd define most of my twenties as knowing exactly what I wanted to do but not being old enough to do it (case in point, it is not possible to start to train as a psychotherapist until you're at least 25). My early to mid-twenties were my meanwhile years, my treading water years. An ungainly growing-out, in-between stage.

And even as I aged, even as I finally became old enough to embrace my vocation it didn't feel real enough. Sure, rationally I knew I was older but the gift of those years didn't sink in. I might have been 26 but I still felt 20 - an impostor trying to pass myself as older than I was, trying to gatecrash, to sneak into the good stuff while waiting for my life to be allowed to really start.

When asked how old I was I would always have to pause, think about it much in the same way that I have to pause and calculate how many years Z and I have been together. I lose track of time, its passing feels dreamlike, I keep having to pause and reorient myself in its flow as I would in the streets of an unkown city or a place glimpsed through the windows of a car.

But now that I am 28, I finally feel 28. As though I don this age like a tailored dress.

It's appropriate enough, it's a Saturn return year and I'm finally where I want to be anchored to the earth by love and responsibility. I am a mother and an apprentice, and I love both things. But more than that I finally have a feeling of belonging, of having worked hard to get here and of doing good work and feeling worthy of respect of being recognised for my achievements.

I am glad to be here. I have travelled a long way. I am no longer the waif or the changeling, the alien or the impostor. I suspect I will always be an eccentric and outsider of sorts (this is fine, I think I would find normalcy a dissapointing experience) but at long last I belong to my true self and my life, the person I am meant to be and the life I am meant to lead are greeting each other rapturously like old friends meeting, like lovers shrugging off adversity and all the years they lost and wasted treading in space.