I had no teen spirit for this new-fangled internet thing

I looked at him blankly and then back the screen.

"This is what's known as a 'search engine'. It's new and it's going to change everything."

Pah! I thought. What on Earth would I want to search for that I don't know already? It'll never take off.

Oh, the misplaced confidence of youth.

It's safe to say my own future did not lie in starring into a crystal ball, or on Wall Street.

It's 1996 and I'm infront of the school's only computer to have 'the internet' completely oblivous to the endless possibilities of this remarkable new tool.

But I had far more pressing matters to deal with because while the world was making unimaginable technological leaps, I was making the tricky personal ascent from child to adulthood.

I entererd the 90s as a Sindy doll-clutching child and exited an (almost) adult, on the way ticking off many of life's major milestones.

And while it was 10 years of the most remarkable physical, emotional and social change I'll ever see, one thing remained constant; I felt uncomfortable in my skin through the lot of it.

In the year the world celebrated Nelson Mandela being freed, I was nine and had known little more than school, and holidays spent playing Swingball and solitaire such is life as an only child.

As the Cold War officially ended in one part of the world, and Jacko pledged to Heal the World, war was officially waged in my home as I became a teen.

I moped around in Benetton sweaters, dyed my hair red, ate too many Big Macs and mooned over boys who didn't give me a second glance while listening to Mariah Carey ballads.

Life didn't improve in the middle teens where I'd taken to living in an oversized Man United shirt and mooning over boys who didn't give me a second glance, although by then I was listening to Boyz II Men.

Later in the decade, while the rest of the country was getting rock'n'roll with Britpop and celebrating the dawn of a new era with Tony 'Things Can Only Get Better' Blair, I was on my second set of fixed braces and dealt an absolute ban from drinking vodka alcopops in the woods with my friends. Life seemingly wasn't getting better for me.

I did, however, attend my first proper gig (sans parents), experience my first kiss (finally!) and get a part-time job to which I earned a shift payment of £2. So it wasn't all doom.

I also passed my driving test and owned my first set of wheels.

This decade was the one that saw me start and swiftly drop out of university, start and then drop out of beauty school, and take a bank job only to find out it was more fun pulling pints in the pub.

I exited the 90s with piercings, tattoos and dip-dyed hair, all gained in the vain effort to feel like I somehow fit in.

Regret is futile, although I do wish I had enjoyed these milestone moments more.

But that's life, I guess, and hindsight is a wonderful thing.

Maybe you aren't meant to enjoy these moments because it makes the ones you enjoy later in life that much sweeter.

And if I found myself back in front of that flickering screen wracking my brains for something to search I'd type in one word 'myself'.

Because it took another 15 years of searching to find the person I was looking for.