grow up!

even children get older, and i'm getting older too

I recently had dinner with someone younger and more successful than me, and asked him whether or not he feels his age. I asked him because I definitely don’t — I’m 25 but feel like a child — and wanted my frame of thinking validated. This is a sticking point for me, apparently, based on this excerpt from my 2024 journal:

I asked M if he thinks of himself as a kid, and he said no. This is absurd to me. How can you not see that we are children? Sometimes at work, I’ll get asked a question and want to respond, why do you think I would know that? I’m just a kid! But I guess to most people I am not a kid, I’m an adult woman, so instead I say, I’m not sure, let me find out for you.

The younger, more successful man I was dining with had the same take as M, strongly held — of course he feels his age. The intensity of his take was communicated through his initial refusal to even consider the question, given its banality, but was quickly followed by a polite and stumbling correction that he’d make an exception, though, this once, on account of his interest in sleeping with me. (He didn’t actually say that last part, that’s my storytelling, but it would have been fine if he did because I also wanted to sleep with him.)

The logic is such: you are your age, and thus your feelings are the feelings of someone your age, and thus you do indeed feel your age. Less garbled: you can’t not feel your age, because it is what you are. It follows that not feeling your age is a narrativized wrapper you’re choosing to adopt, and so you must want said wrapper, or else feel cornered into believing in it, which begs the question: Why? Why are you choosing it? In my case, why am I choosing to feel younger than I am?

Two related theories. The first is that I am shirking responsibility. I don’t want to be held accountable, I don’t like working hard, and I don’t want to increase the likelihood of encountering evidence that I’m incapable of doing a thing I want to do. It doesn’t seem fun to measure myself against the benchmarks of a successful adult, I prefer the ease of being a run-of-the-mill young person, and I’m repulsed by the necessarily psychotic, egotistic exclamations of founder types. I’m deeply worried about overstating my abilities and find it safer and less stressful to assume I have none.

This was workable for a good long while, because I was young for a good long while. But now I am less young, so it’s less cool to act as if I have literally nothing to contribute. I grew up thinking I was mature because I could cook food and follow instructions and arrive on time, but I see now that I’ve always been immature when it comes to assuming responsibility for anyone or anything besides myself. I have a deep fear of being relied upon, not because I am scared of letting others down, but because I loathe accepting when I’ve done something wrong. It is a self-centered and unsympathetic manner of being, and one that I wish to correct.

The second reason why I choose to feel young is that I can’t handle the thought that I’m running out of time. I score low on the neuroticism scale, but my one pervasive stressor is time, or the lack thereof. I am always worried about time: running late, making others wait, having to wait for others, running out of time, not having enough time, disrespecting others’ time, using my time poorly.

If I am young, wasting time is a forgivable mistake. The resource is plentiful, the territory is expansive, an occasional lapse is permissible, just try again! But if I am old, or just older, my decisions carry more permanence. Is now the right time to start caring about my biological clock? Am I leaving enough time for another career pivot? At what point do I stop being seen as an investment and start needing to be worthwhile as I am? Am I squandering my only chance to be an upstart, a force, an ingénue, the main character? Will I look back on today and wish I had committed to something sooner? Will I mourn the years I spent hedging, delaying, keeping my options open, refusing to begin?

As the cool kids (of whom I am no longer one) would say, I am starting to feel the AGI. I’m bracing for the world to look super different and feel moderately worse, at least temporarily. And in a more general and potent sense, I am growing nostalgic — crying to “Landslide” by Fleetwood Mac with brand-new awareness. Now that I’ve finally collected enough years to lose track of them, I am starting to wish I could experience certain ones all over again.

Last month, I spent ten days in the Pacific Northwest — the first bit with friends from university, the second bit with friends from high school. The two halves were joined by a joyful interlude wherein my friend from adulthood, coincidentally in Vancouver and making the same drive to Seattle as my cancelled Amtrak booking, was available to shuttle me across the border.

I cherished these ten days. It was my longest true vacation in years. A verbal montage, to recap: flower bouquets, flaming cocktails, Emergen-C, drugs, gimmicks, pregnancy conspiracies, rain, pop anthems at home, pop anthems at the club, streetwear, birthdays x2, harbors, ferries, day drinking, izakaya, coffeeshop hops, nanaimo bars, Glossier boy brow, drugs, ice cream x3, hot tub, Scattergories, forest bathing, drugs, interventions, revelations, the most beautiful tree I’ve ever seen, Anora, pastries, shopping, friendship.

After this extended stretch of exploring and divulging and getting way too heated playing Catan, I cried while saying goodbye to my friends at the airport. In fact, all of us cried together, in a huddle, the first time we’ve done so since graduating from high school.

I used to want more time so I could do more: cover more ground, travel widely, meet new people, fall in love as many times as permitted. I still want to do these things. But, increasingly, I want more time to just keep doing more of this.

Just this, please, or maybe just that, from not so long ago, that would be enough. Maybe those high school summers spent eating frozen yogurt on park benches, or those childhood bike rides to the animal shelter to coo at puppies, past that lake I almost crashed into before I learned what handbrakes are. Or when we’d pile too many people into too fast Hondas playing Doja Cat too loudly on the way to KBBQ, blowing vape out the windows. Our buzzy conversations in kei cars and camper vans and on gondolas and gravel trails. Maybe the first time an audience clapped for my words, or the second, or third. Tripping down the tallest mountain in Hokkaido, gasping at tea fields ocean-endless in Fukuoka, giggling post-heatstroke flat-backed on tatami after miles and miles of movement. Those early days with the forgotten strawberries and money checks and rooftop picnics. Our macaroni curve bodies and tacit neglect of alarms. Your breezy side silhouette superseding my save file of San Francisco. The soft embarrassment of realizing how much I like this, how much I like you. The welcome ache of never forgetting, of recalling, tensing, lurching, of being subject to this depth forever.