Life Crisis

I decided that it was about time to have another identity crisis. I was about to turn thirty on Friday and on Wednesday, I was cast in a play as a fifteen year old high school student. That would have been fine if all the other people cast were older too. They were not. This is a college student production and all the other people cast were eighteen to twenty years old. I am the only grad student and an old one at that. I don’t look like it though which is why I was cast as the youngest character in the play. The play has eight high school students and I am the younger sister of the main character, making me the youngest. I didn’t think being cast as someone half my age would be an unpleasant experience, but it was. One of the resolutions I made when I was coming up on my thirtieth birthday was to stop lying about my age, which I have been successfully doing for years. I usually admit to twenty four or twenty five. But now I am letting everyone know I was turning thirty. Then a few days later I receive confirmation that I still resemble a high schooler. I would have been fine with college age but high school age is too much. I almost feel insulted by my face. I want to tell it to look older.

But this is where the crisis comes in. I think I do look older. I have fine lines around my eyes. My forehead is more bumpy and one wrinkle sometimes stays put. After staring at the mirror and seeing evidence of my decay, I want to yell at the undergraduates of the world and ask them why they cannot see I definitely look much older than all of them. That didn’t happen, but I wanted it to. It really makes me question the order of death and destruction in the world when I now look younger than I used to look, or the same as I have looked for the last fifteen years. I finally figured out the best hairstyle for me and in the last couple months have got it as close to perfection as I can. I finally started using face cream after I got back from Europe a few months ago. I guess the real problem is that I thought I would be further along in life by the time I was thirty, and that I would look it too. Thinking back to my first identity crisis when I was nine, this one is barely a blip, but that nine year-old expected her thirty-year-old counterpart to at least have been on more dates and be married by this point. I had a real job for a while before going back to school, so I don’t feel like a failure on that front.

This crisis is nothing like a couple others I’ve had. I started lying about my age to avoid crisis. Acceptance and being okay with my age was something of a healthy move. But was it? Should I have kept lying to myself? I don’t think I mind being thirty. Being single and thirty is more troubling. Just ask my parents. Being single, thirty, and being unable to date anyone your age because you look like a kid is torture. Have you ever had a crush on a guy and then discovered he is ten years younger than you? It is a bit disturbing. And if it is disturbing for me, I can imagine it’s worse for the guy.

Maybe I can just put this down to being in too many rehearsals for Oedipus at Colonus or reading too much Freud for my psychoanalytic literature class this semester. Or maybe I’m cursed to be single and look far too young the rest of my life. It may sound good but it isn’t.