HUMANS 101
How to Be Excited About Growing Older
Being a twirtysomething is a strange but illuminating thing
I’d been warned as a teenager that growing older was a scam. “Being an adult,” Meredith Grey began, “TOTALLY OVERRATED.” In the first season of Grey’s Anatomy, she told me:
Seriously, don’t be fooled by the hot shoes and great sex and no parents anywhere telling you what to do. Being an adult is responsibility. Responsibility really does suck. Adults have to be places and do things and earn a living and pay the rent.
Today, I am a 28-year-old, a young professional, and a first-time condo dweller. And to Meredith, I say: I fully concur.
But then, last December, something strange happened. A question thrown in a supposedly no big deal kind of way caught me off guard — and made me rethink what it means to get older. A friend asked, “How old do you feel you are?”
“I feel like I’m…”
I struggled to continue, considering how my friends said they felt like they were still in their early twenties.
“33?!” a friend teased.
Well, I was just going to say 30.
But given my friends’ endearing humor, I had no choice. That night, I was thereby decreed…
