Twenty-first century woman

This sounds very silly but it was only just before Christmas that I suddenly realised ‘I am living in the 21st century!’

It is obviously not that, at some level, I have failed to understand that this has been the case for the all of the last 13 (or 12) years.

I think that the focus on the millennium was responsible in the first place for my failure simply to incorporate the century so that it too became the shorthand for how I thought of the new dates.

But also at that turn I was deeply embroiled in the Victorian Age, reading contemporary magazines, newspapers & memoirs, even seeing Victorian rather than modern Manchester as I moved & travelled around. And, given that I have always struggled slightly to keep straight in my mind the difference between ordinal & cardinal naming of the centuries, having to take care that I used the appropriate digits in my written work, sometimes genuinely feeling that I was living in the C19th.
Somehow the realisation that I have, indeed, become a woman of the 21st century makes me feel strangely proud. As if I had achieved something.

Related post
Counting the centuries