With my next birthday rolling around, I thought to myself today, Ahh, finally I won't have to say I'm twenty-three.
As if being 24 is all that different. This has been a strange age; I feel like I've never had so many people speak to me in a derogatory nature of 23 year olds as the elite class of especially naive humans. I know not to take offense, as they likely don't mean anything by it -- more than likely they forgot that I am in fact lumped into whatever their ideas are about 23 year olds. The time it bothers me is when it's followed up by, "Ugh!...Wait, how old are you?" I might as well answer "I'm naive, overly self-confident, and stubborn years old." Or when I first meet people, and the age question comes up all-too quickly.
See, being my age doesn't actually bother me, just that anyone would ever assume anything about me based on it, especially that it might automatically make me simultaneously naive and a know-it-all. If anything, that's where the adolescent yearning to age comes from, but the sick and twisted part is that we can never quite comprehend the part about getting older. That part is important. Yet, no matter how much anyone forewarns that getting older is also hard and that you probably don't want to actually get older, you want to because then maybe you'll feel less defined by however young you are.
And in one moment of looking at myself in the mirror, washing my hands and thinking how I will finally answer that question with "I'm 24," -- never mind that oh my gosh I AM getting older -- I realized it does not matter. Chasing after the next mile marker of time only wastes the in-between; the now.
Anyway, those who know me don't write me off based on my age, and those who do [write me off], just don't know me well enough to know better. Another lesson in grace, this one wherein I swallow my pride and listen to running mouths.
