1. I’ve developed a bad habit of examining the temples and hairlines of my 30-something friends and acquaintances for signs of gray hair or a dye job.
Like most fifteen year-olds, I was always delighted when the clerk at Putt Putt or a long-lost relative upwardly misjudged my age by a year or two. Looking older than my years was a sign that the mistaken party had picked up on the air of sophistication and maturity that I was striving for and had apparently achieved, with the aid of Wet ‘N Wild lip gloss and Bonne Bell eyeshadow. However, these same misjudgments began to hit me like a snowball to the face soon after my twenty-first birthday. It was no longer exciting for someone to ratchet up my age once all the milestones of youth—driver’s license, voter registration (good citizen that I was), legal drinking age—had all been marked. The day that strangers stop assuming that I’m a student upon our introduction will likely inflict lasting damage on my psyche.
Hair, I’ve decided, is a telltale indicator of youth. My mom started to “go gray” when she was 18, and this bit of family history hung over me like a specter until I’d gotten well beyond that tender age myself with nary a silver thread in sight. Now that I’m in the home stretch of my twenties—in my very last twenty, actually—I can’t help my eyes from darting invasively towards the parts and hairlines of friends, and wondering who among us will be the last to maintain a virgin head of hair that is true to the color of her childhood. Men have it worse, I think. A friend told me years ago that her fiancée was self-conscious about his newly receding hairlines, despite her reassurances that this was only normal at the age of twenty-seven. Twenty-seven! She said it as though he were forty-seven. And forty-seven sounds very young to me now. I am fascinated by how ephemeral youth has proved to be—or the appearance of it, rather.
2. Previously suppressed shallow tendencies have begun to surface in the form of increased time in front of the bathroom mirror.
My mother probably won’t back me up on this, but I was never a mirror dweller. I self-righteously snickered, under my breath, when I walked past women and girls in public restrooms who lingered in front of the oversized mirrors, their hands long since clean, as they endlessly examined their appearances. The particular objects of my scorn were those who carted a toolbox of cosmetics to school or work with them to ensure that at no point during the day were they without lipstick or eyeliner. While I have not yet joined the ranks of the toolbox women, and I still tend to beat it out of public restrooms, post-hand washing, I have lately found myself, in the privacy of my own bathroom, scrutinizing my visage, looking for any little change since the week before. Recently, I lamented the appearance of symmetrical creases under each eye, sure that they were a blaring announcement to the world that my twenties are over and I will hereafter appear permanently fatigued. Then I noticed the very same lines settled comfortably beneath my 10-year old eyes in my fifth grade class photo. Perhaps if I’d spent more time in front of the mirror back then, I could have spared myself my present paranoia.
3. My formerly bulletproof protection against the world’s expectations has turned up several chinks.
Most of my friends have already turned 30, and I watched as they experienced career/marriage/baby panic with a very unsportsmanlike lack of sympathy. “Thirty,” I assured them smugly, “is an arbitrary number to use as a benchmark for any of one’s life plans.” However, as the weight of a new decade bears down upon me, I find myself alternately overtaken by my own various panics, and at peace about it all. Turns out, it is much harder than I expected it would be to ignore the social and cultural expectations, perceived or otherwise, of what one’s life should look like at 30. I’m trying to resist the temptation to see this age as more significant than any of the others that I’ve seen come and go. The lesson for me, so far, is in the resisting, and in arriving at this latest milestone without fear.
