I’m finally acting my age, and it’s humiliating.
Growing up, a phrase I became very familiar with hearing was “you’re so mature for your age!” I bloomed under such praises. I smiled wide, all gap teeth and smugness, and gave my thanks, took my bow, collected my roses.
In elementary school, this “maturity” got me long, detailed and sincere notes written in my yearbooks by my favorite teachers. Later, it got me into trouble. When men my fathers age would lean in and whisper that they “couldn’t believe I was only nineteen,” I grinned. I said “thank you.” I didn’t lean away.
Now there is no shock on peoples faces when they learn my age. No one gasps or claps or tells me how impressed they are by my vocabulary and strong eye-contact. I’m twenty-four, and I act like it. All the stereotypes about the mid-twenties are ringing true. I am entitled. I am lazy. I rarely wash my underwear. I sleep all day and survive on a diet of energy drinks and stale tortilla chips. I take things too personally.
I am just as lost as everyone says you are in your mid-twenties, only I was stupid and arrogant enough to think that this wouldn’t happen to me. I was going to be the exception. Everybody said so.
I want to blame it on the grief, pull the Dead Dad Card and pretend that everything was going great until Dad walked into the bathroom that one morning a month ago and never came out. I want to claim that that is when things went sideways. I want to fault him for this. But I’m a bad liar and there is an ever-growing pile of evidence that points to me being the problem. I’m the origin. I’m the reason why I’m unhappy.
As ugly as it feels to say, a part of me was hoping this would be some kind of “out.” My dad died. There should be a before and an after. This huge quake hit and the ground gave way, and the aftermath was supposed to reveal something new. Not better, but different. I was supposed to have some kind of awakening. The grief was supposed to usher me into my next creative boom. I was gonna wake up one morning, realize that life is fleeting and unpredictable, and decide to take it by its horns. I was gonna make my dad proud.
But all I do is sit and smoke and buy shit on the internet.
It turns out that everything I don’t like about myself is still right here. I’m still stagnant in my career. I’m still struggling to make friends who aren’t my mom. I still spend too much time looking in the mirror and being mad over things that happened years ago. Everything is different and nothing is different.
I know that I am usually slow to work through things. Last one out the door, Most Likely to Go Down With the Ship, collecting dust while everyone else gets up and moves on. And yeah, that is a Taylor Swift reference. But if this hasn’t jolted me into action, into being a real person, what the fuck is it gonna take? And how selfish am I, for seeing my fathers sudden death as further evidence of my own failures?
This isn’t about me. The world is huge and nothing is actually about me, and I wish I was able to digest that anonymity as a kind of freedom instead of a threat.
“Even when we were happy, even when we reassured each other we were really living, there was a feeling lying in us that we were not. We squashed our faces against the glass of our own lives. Is this it? Are we having fun like they have fun? Are we in love like they are in love? We ran from the truth that the answer was in the question. We were not, and never would be, satisfied.”
Two weeks ago I was sitting in the backseat of my mothers car, waiting for her to get out of the grocery store. I wanted a cigarette and didn’t want to put a bra on and figured she could handle the list on her own. Cheese. Coconut Water. Granola. Tampons. I waited in the parking lot with the window rolled down and I read that passage. It’s from Brutes by Dizz Tate. The story follows a group of young girls living in a Floridian suburb. They want to be famous, they want to be in love, they want to be beautiful and big and have power of their own.
I am mortified by how closely my current emotional state, my sticky-fingered stuck-ness, my jealousy and worry and fear of all things real, mirrors theirs.
I want people to think I’m pretty. I want people to think I’m busy. I want to think I’m pretty. I don’t want to be sad, but being sad is so easy. It gives me an excuse for how gross and halted I am.
When I said that I’ve been acting my age lately, I was being generous.
The truth, is that me and these fictional thirteen-year-olds… we match.
Dronme
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