Get old on your own time

Age is just a number

Tessa Vanderhart Staff

“Guess how old she is?”

The question that strikes fear into the hearts of far too many in our youth-obsessed culture poses a very different problem for me.

With every utterance of my age, I miss out: the perfect job for which I’m not yet mature enough, the perfect man whom I am not qualified to date, the realization of my innumerable aspirations, dangled tantalizingly in the future.

For a society that loves youth so much, you have a funny way of showing it.

Yes, that’s right, I’m complaining about being too young. It’s not that I’m superior; it’s just that I’m sick of being alternately patted on the head and reproached for my unfortunate inability to act my age.

To great hilarity, I spend much of my time convincing people that I’m older than I actually am. Somewhat arbitrarily, I’ve decided that 23 is an appropriate age for me, based loosely on some notion of a social timeline.

You know, the little voice inside your head (or, disturbingly, on the other side of the phone when you call your mother) that demands a clearly articulated life goal at 22, marriage at 24, kids by 26 — and nothing but partying before then.

Is it asking too much to live outside of those social norms? In an age when self-fulfilment is supposed to be the be-all end-all, why does society continue to place so much emphasis on an archaic social timeline?

Sure, it’s easy to say that there are social bounds on everything, debatably for good reason. But I fail to see how being mature enough to, say, drive or vote doesn’t make me mature enough to get married or have a serious job. Thanks for the vote of confidence, society!

Except in the bizarro world of Stephen Harper, where jail is acceptable at an earlier stage of development than sex (I wonder what he’d say about getting married at 19!), there is nonetheless a chronological process that one is supposed to follow.

But for me, chronology is less logical, and less fun, than doing things on my own time — even if that means racing through my undergrad and finding myself, next year already, in the wide world of grad school (barring the presence of some wunderkind) as the youngest person in my class.

Of course I feel the pain of the other side, as well: there is absolutely nothing wrong with being 28 and without a significant other, job, or career path — so long as you’re having fun, and preferably, I would suppose, so long as you haven’t amassed a vast student loan debt in the process.

In fact, the problem is largely the same, echoed in friends of all different ages: what is expected of them at 20, 24, 28 or, hell, 52, somehow doesn’t quite fit with where they see themselves, a divide no number of quizzes on your “real age” in old issues of Reader’s Digest could ever reconcile.

“Enjoying youth” and “getting on with life” needn’t be opposites; rather, I’d recommend enjoying life, period. If I choose to do that with my hurry on, what’s the problem?

Perhaps you’re just jealous. Although, given my ability to eschew social norms with regard to age (and a healthy dose of wanting to do everything, everything!), I’d say it’s entirely possible that I’ll find myself in that position, as well, on the wrong side of the “age divide.”

But really, what the hell? Just because you haven’t had kids by age 30 doesn’t mean you’re a failure. Just because you have at 26 doesn’t mean you’re not.

So deal: age is just a number, and a silly one at that. If I can be a mature child and an immature adult — no matter how many social norms I have to bend in the process — I will consider the aging process as having been a success. If not, well, I’ll always have a couple of years on you.

Tessa Vanderhart will be 20 in four months and three days — and counting.