When I was a kid I thought I'd be beautiful when I was seventeen. It didn't matter how ugly or short or lumpy I was, it didn't matter whether I got braces, or spots or puppy fat because I knew that one magic day I would turn seventeen, and I'd be beautiful.

In my mind Cinderella was seventeen. Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Rapunzel... they were all seventeen.

I was the Ugly Duckling. But that was okay, because the day was coming when the spots would evaporate into thin air, the braces would spring off, the puppy fat magically fall away, and there I would be, in all my fabulous swan-like glory.

Seventeen.

What I didn't know was that when I became seventeen, I would still have inside me the 16 year old and the 15 year old and the 10 year old and the 5 year old. They don't disappear, you just take them with you.