At Twenty-Something

There is something about being twenty-something that makes life seem so substantially overwhelming. It's a restless spirit that's different from that of being a teenager. I always thought that being a teenager would be the ultimate stage of feeling stuck, but the older I get I feel that life is like slogging deeper and deeper purposefully into the mud in hopes of finding solid ground.

At least as a teenager I thought it was just a part of adolesence. It was a phase, a necessary transitional stage in life. I was going through puberty, and as horrific as that was I at least had the belief that whatever was on the other side was going to better. I thought at the end of puberty I would emerge as an adult. As a caterpillar metaphorphes into a butterfly, I thought I too would become this other person that would bear very little physical resemblance to what was. Unfortunately, it was just a misconception.

It's odd. That feeling just hasn't gone away. Sometimes I think to myself that thing's will be different when I "grow up" as if I hadn't already. I'm still waiting for the time when I'll grow five more inches and my chest will fill out. Then I could lose ten pounds and grow my hair out long and actually accomplish something. Like the glamazonian Barbie I am likely to be, I'd go to work as a doctor/dentist/astronaut/veterinarian/cake decorator in my jeep, wearing stilettos and a dress suit. Only then would I be able to tackle marriage and children and all the other adult stuff I can't right now because I'm not a grownup.

So maybe it was true all along that society, Barbie included, had given me a skewed perception of women. But I'm not one to disparage Barbie, and models, and actresses, and all the other beautiful women in society. Nor am I one to decry that society has wronged womankind by espousing certain norms as "beautiful" because as far as I'm concerned that's merely biology.

I just wish that someone had explained it to me clearly.

"You can grow up to be whatever you want to be" doesn't actually mean what it sounds like it means. Somethings are just impossible. For example, I can't be a dinosaur or a helicopter. Some things are too unrealistic. Like the chances of me becoming a princess is slim to none. Most things require a lot of effort, like becoming a doctor or a ballerina. All things require money. With money I can buy myself a pair of boobs and a relatively new face. Unfortunately money still can't buy me five inches. (That's what she said.)

As it turns out, the more of a penchant you have for imagination, the more limited and constraining life turns out to be. And that's how my own expectations of life ended up being so incongruent with the reality of things...


At least that's what I'm going to say for now because gawd knows I don't want to get into the actualities of my faults that led me here, and I mean other things in addition to the lack of meaningful breasts.