5 hours Ago By Slutty Cheff
At 27, Janis Joplin sang a sad song about her boyfriend before injecting a lethal dose of heroin and dying. At 27, Jimi Hendrix took nine sleeping pills instead of one and never woke up. At 27, Kurt Cobain was found dead with a shotgun and bullet wounds in his head.
And at 27, Amy Winehouse died of alcohol intoxication in her flat in Camden. On the eve of my 27th birthday, perhaps fuelled by the absurdly self-inflated idea that I too am a world-famous rockstar, I find myself thinking about the 27 Club. I wonder: am I enjoying this whole living thing? Turning 27 feels old to me.
I’m sure 37-year-olds might read that and think, Oh, you ignorant little shite bag . To that, I say: fair enough. But it’s my first time living on Earth, too – how can you expect me to have the perspective of someone with 10 more years of life experience? Of course I’m more naïve than you.
Despite entering my late 20s, I still don’t feel clear on my identity. I don’t feel like a woman yet; I still feel like a girl. If this were the 19th century, I’d be about seven years away from a natural death, with 10 children and undoubtedly some sort of terminal cyst caused by sewage or rats.
I don’t feel like a chef either, despite all my years of chopping onions. And I certainly don’t feel worthy of the esteemed title of writer, despite having published a book and launched a Vogue column. At 27, my identity still feels half-baked.
Perhaps identity is like gender – unnecessary to define with generic labels. Maybe I’m not a writer, but a shit-talker. Perhaps I’m not a chef, but a carcass conductor.
Maybe I’m not a woman, but a menace with tits. Identity used to matter to me, but as I turn 27, I find I don’t care anymore. The thing most members of the 27 Club have in common is a keen interest in drugs and alcohol.
Their bodies were not temples but abattoirs where their lives were cut short in dour fashion. I enjoy most things in excess – whether it’s love and sex, food and wine, or cigarettes and alcohol. But I’m often reminded of something my uncle, who struggled with addiction, once told me: “Never do so much of something that you can never do it again.
” I love this idea. It doesn’t depict our lovely vices as dangerous forbidden fruits we must avoid at all costs but rather as delicate luxuries to treasure and not take for granted. More and more people are sober these days.
I will not be one of them – not in my 27th year, anyway. As I approach 27, the lady woes are creeping up faster than I’d like. The other day, my therapist mentioned the F-word.
Not fuck – a word with far more emotional potency: fertility. She said if I continue drinking and smoking as much as I do, it could affect my fertility. My jaw dropped.
Fertility? I’m twenty-fucking-six. What is this, the Dark Ages? Why does no one believe me when I say I’ll be the first woman to have biological children at 60? I refuse to engage in this rhetoric. Say I give birth to two small humanoids in my 30s.
I then spend my 40s rearing the bastards and my 50s tending to the sweaty decline of the body they stole from me. That doesn’t sound joyous to me right now. Trying to make me discuss my fertility as I turn 27 is pointless – and, contrary to popular belief in 2024, it is indeed my vagina and my choice.
In the age of social media, deranged self-obsession and angst, we’re all constantly worrying about bettering ourselves and not wasting a moment of our lives. Ten-year-old kids are reporting live at 5am in their quest to become successful business moguls. Eighteen-year-olds are using anti-ageing skincare products.
People are rubbing rocks on their jaws to reshape their faces. Teenagers think the word manifestation is more important than masturbation. Why are we pretending that the lines on our foreheads are as concerning as track marks on our forearms? I’m sick of being told how to exist in the world, and how to do things better.
Each year, on the night before my birthday, I indulge in a sentimental ritual. I’m deeply emotional and like to romanticise my life to make things seem better. Every birthday eve, I write a long diary entry, including a list of things I’d like to do in the year ahead.
This year, for the first time, it’s damn hard. Not because I’m perfect or my life is complete, and not because an influencer inspired me to use BetterHelp and it’s been “reeaaally enlightening”. No – it’s because I care less.
When I look at the 27 Club and the angst and terror its members must have faced, I don’t romanticise it. I think about how lucky I am to exist in more ease than I’ve known before. In my 27th year, I won’t tick off a long list.
I will do just one thing: exist. Slutty Cheff is the author of the forthcoming Tart: Misadventures of an Anonymous Chef , published by Bloomsbury on 17 July 2025.
