If it hasn’t been brought up before or if people have just met me, they tend to guess that I’m older than I really am. I think it’s a skincare thing: I’ve gotten a lot of sun and not enough sleep for years, and I boozed pretty hard in my early twenties, so my almost-twenty-six-year-old face often elicits guesses of twenty-nine or (god forbid) thirty. You wear hard years harder on your face.
Maybe their guesses of twenty-nine or (gulp) thirty have as much to do with how I act as how I look, which is a polite way of saying I’m usually quiet at parties these days.
I found myself at one of those on Sunday night for a good friend’s birthday. I was preoccupied—my hip hurt, the only beer I had to drink was Shipyard Pumpkinhead (real ones will know I’m a nasty IPA drinker), it was kinda late, I was tired, and most importantly, I felt old. Mostly for the reasons I just listed, but also because I found myself standing in the kitchen making small talk with others who don’t feel at home in the big bustle of a party, notably Maddy, whose birthday we also celebrated happily this weekend.
It wasn’t a bad time by any means. But it did elicit a feeling I’ve been feeling more and more often, lately: that my version of twenty-five is somehow inferior, old, tired, wrung out, compared to other people. It could have something to do with momentum. I work a nine-to-five, and between open mics and jiu jitsu classes I’m rarely home early unless I’m sick or so exhausted that I can’t bring myself to go out. This leaves me slacking on sleep, excelling at consumption, and feeling “old,” when really I’m probably just sleep deprived.
The question is what I expect myself to be doing otherwise, though. What would a “young” twenty-five look like?
The best advice I ever got came from a mentor/professor from grad school. I shudder to admit it, but at the time I was working on what I thought would be a memoir, which consisted at the time mostly of vignettes about misbehavior, heavy drinking, impulsive decisions—you know, the stuff that characterized twenty-two and twenty-three, for me. That project has since been abandoned or, looked at with as much optimism as possible, lies dormant at best.
I was talking with the previously-mentioned advisor about the project and I said something about wondering what would happen to me if I didn’t change, if I didn’t abandon recklessness for discipline, and “become an adult.”
He said: “It’s simple—eventually, it stops being cute.”
When you’re in your early twenties, say fresh off twenty-one, you can get away with a lot, at least physically and socially. You can go into work hungover and, depending on your job, your performance won’t suffer much, and even if it does, you have leeway to be somewhat of a mess because other people see you as young. There’s almost a societal expectation, at least in jobs I’ve worked before, that when you come in on a Monday, you might be haggard from an ill-spent weekend partying and doing “young people stuff.” You can drink and eat and not sleep and, assuming some level of exercise and an occasional salad, you won’t get fat. At least I didn’t, until I turned twenty-five and gained thirty pounds. Not that I’m fat, no matter how much I feel like I am. Whatever, that’s not the point of this.
Anyway, ultimately, it’s a patience your body and your peers will afford you a finite number of times before it starts to get old, i.e., before it stops being cute.
I stretched this patience from twenty-one through twenty-two years old, into twenty-three and twenty-four. Maybe it was owed partially to covid, and turning twenty-one at the height of lockdown, and using the subsequent years to overcompensate for some vague FOMO. Maybe it’s owed partially to arrested development on my part, trying to scratch some itch or to act a certain way to fit in, or (more likely), to stand out. Maybe it’s owed partially to laziness and complacence, telling myself things were fine because I feared the unknown presented by the prospect of changing, even for the better. Or maybe it’s explained even just by boredom: finding the day-to-day of an office job easy and trying to make it more difficult and therefore more interesting via halfhearted attempts at self-sabotage. As if to say, “look at how much I can do even when I’m not at my best.” Writing it out now makes it appear so obviously fucking lame to me, but at the time, that wisdom eluded me. I guess that’s what makes it wisdom: you rarely know it when you’re supposed to, always later, and only via hindsight.
Now, at twenty-five, as a stable and reliable employee who still tries to have fun during the week with friends, I feel old when I spend my weekend doing “normie” things like enjoying lunches, having a bonfire, sleeping in. Maybe that feeling is just an extension of another feeling that I’ve tried, in the past year or two, to leave behind: the feeling that somehow I am exceptional or different from most people.
The reality, which was always the most likely situation, is that I am not different from most people. What’s wrong with being a “normie” anyway? My parents were normies and their meeting resulted in me being here. When I’m acting like a “normie,” I’m usually spending quality time with people or pets I love. What am I subconsciously trying to prove?
Life isn’t an action movie.
Where I used to think, evidently, that I needed to make life more difficult just to show off, now I wonder how much I could achieve if I just got out of my own way, like I wrote last week.
Do I feel old, or do I just feel more responsible and therefore boring?
Even if I did, what’s wrong with being boring?
Well, it’s boring. There you have it, folks—never say I didn’t teach you anything. Boredom is boring.
But, it’s not a moral failure. And being responsible doesn’t necessarily mean you’re boring, either. I was not bored this weekend—just because I’d prefer to be in bed by eleven p.m. these days doesn’t mean I’m boring as a person.
Maybe I feel old because, for the first time, I’m acting my age. At least I’m not sitting on the side of the road with binoculars watching the birds. But I have to admit, that doesn’t sound half bad either.
matt nilsen 