Help! I'm Obsessed With My Age

I finally realized the true reason why I started my Brookie project. I intended to honor my inner teenage girl, to tell stories about my past that I have never told, to give young Brianna the respect and the platform to be herself that she always deserved. But I also have another goal that's kind of contradictory to the whole Brookie thing. I want to prove to myself that I am actually a grown woman in spite of my constant feelings of immaturity and the belief that I am emotionally and developmentally stunted in some ways due to all the things that didn't happen in my younger years. It's because I'm obsessed with age and aging. I thought I had made strides in making peace with my past, but it turns out I am still utterly, terribly obsessed with it.

I've been listening to Free Period, a podcast hosted by Alana Haim and Sasha Spielberg, in which they talk about their middle school years and how those years, specifically 7th grade, shaped the women they are today.  I'm a huge HAIM fan and I saw Buzzy Lee open up for them at the Bowl last year so I was so stoked when I saw that these two would be making a podcast. We have so much in common! We are admitting we're obsessed with the younger versions of ourselves so much that we're willing to go back and put it all out there, in the name of understanding ourselves now. 

They have guests on the show most weeks, in which they discuss their guest's school experiences. Naturally, discussions with their guests often lead to the whole first kiss, first boyfriend, first time thing. I love, love, love Alana and Sasha as hosts but in a couple of episodes, they expressed a sense of surprise at learning their guests hadn't had boyfriends in high school or that they had been virgins until their late teens, which made me feel kind of judged. I have had to pause while listening sometimes due to the visceral experience of my inexperience slapping me so hard across my face that I felt physically ill. I have yet to experience being in a romantic relationship. It took me actual years to even be able to talk to dudes with some semblance of confidence, much less kiss one. Talk about triggered.

When I am triggered, I do what any reasonable person does and try to stuff these horrid thoughts down with TikTok and Instagram and random YouTube videos, which of course, lead to more obsessive thoughts about the age thing. I love #skincaretok but now I have to be concerned with anti-aging in addition to wanting to get rid of my acne and huge ass pores. Am I getting wrinkly near my eyes? Am I really past my peak attractiveness years?  I also see all these "millennial vs. Gen Z" videos popping up and it makes me want to scream because it makes me feel so old and crusty and dusty and wrong. The whole millennial pause discussion really amped these feelings of insecurity up. I also really love recycling and sustainability discussions online, but the overlap with fashion social media means I'm exposed to some really cool Gen Z fashionistas hitting all these microtrends on my feeds. This means I'm constantly questioning myself now when I get dressed: Am I too old to wear baggy jeans? Do I look like someone's mom when I walk by my high school or could I still pass as a student? Am I trying too hard to seem younger than I really am, in the sense that if my age-peers could see me, would I look absolutely ridiculous? Am I the cringe thirtysomething that's trying to be a teen?

As Kate Lindsay writes in this Atlantic piece about the millennial pause, millennials are :

"...the first cohort to watch their youth fade in real time, with evidence of their growing irrelevance meticulously documented in memes, trends, and headlines published on the very internet they once reigned over. They’re no longer the hot new item brands are scrambling to attract, nor the ones the world is turning to for the next fashion trend. The internet has moved on, and Millennials can either adapt or, like a Gen Xer still listening to Pearl Jam, not care if their choices make them seem old."

So if I can't adapt, I should just embrace being old(er), right?  Right. So what do people my age actually do?

Now that I'm in my thirties, it seems like the baby and engagement and wedding and new job or big move announcements keep coming every day, which are of course, age appropriate life stages for a thirty-something to hit. Each time I see them pop up in a story or a post or a reel, I feel a little less sure of myself. I've done a lot of work in therapy about this anxiety of wanting to keep up with others and feeling left behind ever since I've started therapy at 17. As I get older, I know that people who think that life should go a certain way for everyone and follow some sort of linear path are absolutely ridiculous. Each year that passes, the amount "you should have done this by now" seems to lessen, thank goodness, but social media has a wonderful way of bringing any lingering self-doubts to the forefront of my mind. The easy solution would be, of course, to get off social media, but given that it's my only form of socialization aside from Zumba and going to the store, I'm very reluctant to do so.

Seeing many of my peers turn into parents is also triggering in itself. As far as parenting goes, I have always flip-flopped in my mind between 'maybe' and 'why the hell would I want to bring life into this toxic, smelly, fucked-up world?'. Now that I'm 30, I'm coming to the realization that I would actually have to prepare for the 'maybe'. If this 'maybe' ever turns into a 'yes', will my body be ready? I have PCOS and so there's a real possibility this could affect my fertility. This didn't really matter ten years ago, but now it does and it's scary to admit to myself that I can hear a biological clock ticking far more loudly than it ever has. If I want a family, things have to start happening now that I am in my thirties. I would have to start laying the foundations now by taking better care of my health. I would also have to find a potential partner, which HAHAHA. It's so not happening. Of course, today's woman has the option to do it alone, but that would involve a great deal of money that I don't currently have, so I would have to carefully financially plan for that and also emotionally plan for it too and then it's like... do I even want kids that badly? All this effort to give birth to some smart-mouthed, attention-deficient mini-me? Nah. Fuck them kids. 

So what do I do about this obsession? Obviously, it is having an effect on my mental health if this whole age thing is absolutely dominating my day. I can't stop time. I can't stop the newer generations from seeing me as some sort of digital grandma. I can't stop myself from turning 31 at the end of this year. I can't go back to my teenage years and make different decisions either. But I still have my future and the gift of actually being able to age. With this gift, I wonder: Am I making the right choices in the now? Will I regret the things I'm doing now in ten, twenty, thirty years? I found this book at the library called But You're Still So Young: How Thirtysomethings Are Redefining Adulthood (I told you I'm obsessed!) by Kayleen Schaefer and I immediately checked it out and finished it last month. I took a picture on my phone of the following paragraph and now I think about it a lot. 

"That you have to make choices, that you aren't able to do everything, isn't a sign of life gone wrong. The fact that you're open to various routes, to going sideways or upside down or backward, means it has gone right: you found meaning and value to many different ways of living. To be able to have that in our thirties at this moment of time is a privilege, one that those who came before us didn't always have. It's something to embrace rather than recoil from." 

Every time my mind goes down the dark, deep alley of age-obsession, I hope to remember this advice and shift my attitude to one of gratitude. Here's to embracing life.

NOTE: In case this is the first post you're reading on this blog, this post is part of my Brookie Project, where I am allowing myself to read Rookie Magazine without the guilt that I initially had because I felt way older than its intended audience since when it was first introduced to the world in late 2011. The weird thing, now that I am reading these past issues 10+ years later than they were published, is that most of these themes relate to my life not only as it was ten or fifteen years ago, but NOW, as I'm in my thirties. This project will let me step back in time, talk about today, and plan for the future. I will read and respond to Rookie's themes month by month, because I think editor Tavi Gevinson did an excellent job at making the themes specific enough to capture a particular mood but broad enough to include the stories, journeys and work of a diverse group of teenage girls around the world.  Today's post was inspired by Rookie, Issue 5: Obsession.