There was a time when we couldn’t wait to grow up. It started with some lip gloss and sort of made a drastic swerve when you did your first seven minutes in heaven in your classmate’s closet with a random waif boy. Then we enjoyed the freedom that came with every year that followed: the demolition of curfews, the right to wear a few feet of fabric as a skirt and, of course, not having to lock yourself in a closet so that you may date. Suddenly, something happens: it hits you in your late-twenties to your mid-sixties: you start lying about your age. Suddenly you find yourself wanting to do everything to stay at that comfortably independent age of 25, an age that allows room for mistakes but also an age where you can still be silly without looking retarded.
I started reading my old articles from when I first wrote six years ago in The STAR (six years, I can’t believe it, it’s my longest relationship ever) and there were many that I read with much chagrin. Like balancing champagne flutes on my head, a longwinded account of my distaste for sugary non-alcoholic beverages or just babbling about outfits and dieting. For these silly things to manifest themselves in the paper, and thinking I was being a tad clever and plenty cheeky, now makes my skin crawl. So maybe I’m glad to have grown up a little bit so that I may exalt the grandness of television and the state of restaurants in the city. Hey, this column is still about fluff, you know.
I started to lie intermittently about my age when I turned 21. My friends are all 10 years older than I am and had already started doing so and it just caught up with me and has been the hacking cough of my logic ever since. This also means that in the winter of my years I will be friendless for the last 10 years of my life because they will all be dead by then. But that’s another Edgar Allen Poe moment for me to discuss further later on, when I’m in a fouler mood. Now I still assume the title of teenager. Thank heavens for my moon-shaped face and natural disposition to be immature; I can easily fool people.
However, you have to ask the question of why we’re so afraid to grow old. Where’s this Peter Pan syndrome coming from? Many say it’s purely for vanity, which trickles down to having a larger dating pool, makes getting out of trouble easier (unless you’re 70-plus then you can get away with murder or, at the very least, free movie tickets until you die), and of course, the world will always love a young vivacious thing. Getting more advanced in age has definitely made me more boring and bitchy. I’m more particular about what I want, I simply cannot be friendly to just about anyone anymore (small talk ceases to be), my instinct has been clouded with the deep green of jadedness and, of course, each day I become more crazy in a sugar-free, Leona Helmsley kind of way.
This kind of fibbing is normal with actors and models (exhibit A: the cast of Beverly Hills 90210), but for mere mortals it’s kinda pathetic. Yet many still do it anyway. This obsession goes beyond wrinkles and sagging asses. There comes a time when you look at yourself in the mirror, highly critical of who you have become, and wish that you didn’t care so much, like you were in your carefree 20s. There comes a time when you realize that you’re gonna have to learn to live with yourself and there will be some spots and scars that won’t be erased that easily. As we get older we learn new things, unlearn many important things in our youth that kept us thinking that the glass was always half full and, inevitably, we start inviting an ironic brand of stupidity into our lives. It’s also scary to know that even the smallest mistakes can result in massive collateral damage. The older you get the more real your life becomes and the consequences are not as fleeting as they used to be. You screw up a relationship in college, you know you’ll live, even if at the moment it doesn’t feel like it. In your 30s (I’m so not 30 yet), the consequences are much more sensational and its effects will haunt the many different aspects of your life.
That’s why it sucks. However, there are many things to celebrate with age as well. Although it’s hard to find a fabulous person who ages gracefully (booze, cigs and drama can take a toll) and heaven forbid I’ll find myself drooling uncontrollably on my mixed polyester dress during my granddaughter’s graduation, I’d rather be shuttered in a nursing home, leafing through my photo albums daily and talking about my peak years to a half-listening nurse. With age we start becoming important to ourselves. The people we love become essential. The decisions we make are life-altering. We begin to really live life and not just rehearse it.
However, for that extra twinkle in your eye and that dewy glow that cannot be delivered by Prevage, one has to always remember what was great about being young even if we were just rehearsing then. A sense of humor, an ability to laugh at one’s self, to have the memory of a goldfish when it comes to embarrassing and terrible things, to be able to still flirt with that male model even when you know you have no chance in hell, and organic food preserves you into staying an ingénue.
Yes, youth is wasted on the young. But if you keep the things that made you happy in your foolish younger years and are still able to carry them into your post-quarter-life crisis, you will see that what you have with you is a lifetime of unwasted youth.