I turned twenty the last week of this past June, and so far, to be honest, I’m not a fan.
I don’t like how it sounds. I’m 20. It added a thin veneer of patheticism to everything. Living at home with your parents over the summer when you’re nineteen? Fine. When you’re ‘in your twenties’? Might as well be the schmuck in a Seth Rogan movie. I woke up on June 27th overwhelmed with the intense anxiety that I was no longer a teenager. Now if I did something good, it was no longer considered precious or brilliant; if I fucked up, it was no longer swept aside as ‘being a teenager’. I was officially a 20-something, and I felt suddenly trapped on the slow march towards a boring career and possibly marriage and children and then gaining twenty pounds at my metabolism shuts down and then death.
This sounds insane, right? I do have an anxiety disorder and a tendency toward hyperbole. Unfortunately, though, I think that insane pressure is part of a larger problem.
When people turn, like, twenty-six, they start lying about their ages. It’s accepted. It’s joked about. It’s part of society. Every song on the radio is about how being young is the best thing ever and life is meaningless if you're not doing stupid things and living a life with no responsibility.
The aisles of the drugstore down the street from my house are stocked to the roof with rejuvenate this and smooth down, brighten that. I see people reading self-help books called Goddesses Never Age, and magazines posts listicle after listicle about how no women in Hollywood can get roles after the age of thirty because they’re considered decrepit old crones. People like me, who still aren’t old enough to legally drink, feel like their youth is wasting away and with it, any chance to have a happy, meaningful life.
The average human lifespan the United States is seventy-nine years. When did we decide only the first fifth of that was worth celebrating? Such an attitude causes anxiety leading up to those years to live some magical, John Green-esque golden era, and depression afterwards, because of course they couldn’t live up to those insane expectations. Goddesses do age, and that should be okay. Rejuvenating anything sounds scary. And the reason more women over thirty aren’t getting movie roles is because of a sexist and misogynistic film industry that in large part buys into the very idea that 23 is the new 40!
I have friends who weren’t born until their parents were in their forties. The average age of someone publishing their first novel is 34. There is so much life to experience even when the titles of Taylor Swift songs don’t match up with your birthday cake. We need to stop teaching people that all they should aspire to be is between the ages of 18 and 22.
