Understanding what age insecurity is and how it plays a role throughout life
By VIOLET ZANZOT — vmzanzot@ucdavis.edu
Nine is my lucky number, 10 is double digits, 13 makes a teenager, 15 is endless anxiety about not being able to drive, 16 is freedom, 18 feels more juvenile than eight and 20 is 20 — I can’t define it because I’m still in it.
I have never felt certain that horoscopes dictate much, but I am certain that being the youngest in my grade defined who I am. Having a summer birthday means no one can come to your party because they are out of town for the Fourth of July. It always falls on a hot day without school, and it means watching kids drive before you and drink before you and tease you about being a “baby.”
The weird thing about age is that it stops mattering so much after 25. At 26 years old, you can drive, drink, rent a car and get kicked off your parents’ health insurance. Past your mid-20s, age is more about perception — how you look and how you act — than it is about the number on your identification card. Age is both a social currency and a measure of self reflection; people see us (and we see ourselves) differently depending on how old we are.
Your age reflects your maturity, life experience and wisdom. These implications are sometimes based on material reality, but are sometimes reflective of social constructs. In America, you can’t legally buy and consume a bottle of wine until you are 21 years old — this is an indisputable fact. At the same time, we often assume people either have not had certain experiences or no longer do because of their age. We assume dramatic heartbreak and independence are reserved for people 15 to 20 and body aches and sage wisdom are reserved for those who have earned their wrinkles.
It is only when we find discrepancies in these patterns that we begin to question something that feels concrete. A number — an amount of years — is like math. It’s like science: a hard and relatively fixed truth. And yet, some children have better emotional regulation skills than their middle-aged parents, and 40-somethings may better understand “play” than their younger counterparts.
We constantly judge people and ourselves with these metrics of time, even as everyone’s numbers change. It’s one of the many elements of life we have absolutely no control over; it’s something we all experience (being on Earth a certain amount of time) and it seems to always mean something to us. From 10 to 100, we are defined by it.
Age is an oxymoron: as constant as it is everchanging. It moves linearly, but not always progressively. I often think about how, when we were young and scraped our knees, we’d hop right back up as older people looked on with envy. Recently, after finally feeling like I was no longer grieving a long-dead relationship, I realized that one day I will hop right up after this kind of heartbreak. One day, six months of breakup pain will take only three to heal from; one day, it will be just another story.
When you’re 6, three years is half of your life. In June, I will graduate from college after three years. Time means different things at different stages of life; progress means different things in different moments. Age is the great equalizer — somehow we’re always insecure about it. We judge ourselves and everyone around us by distance from birth year. No matter what, our age means we should self-reflect, for better or for worse, and we should measure others, for better or for worse. It’s kind of funny that such an unfixed thing seems to never change.
Written by: Violet Zanzot— vmzanzot@ucdavis.edu
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