Saturday, May 28, 2011

Quarter Life Crisis or Becoming Unfuckable




I guess it’s a cliché experience with a cliché term. Quarter Life Crisis.  John Mayer has a song about it, books have been written about it, and “young” women in my friendship group call it endearing names like “The Dirty 30” to make it sound cute.  I have just a few weeks left of being in my 20’s and I am not taking it well.  On some days I am humbled and think, I have my health, I am in good shape, I am getting married to an amazing handsome man that I adore, I have good girlfriends a great job, blah blah blah.  If I get to a yoga class I can actually feel close to at peace with my current age.  BUT. So many of my hours are spent wishing for more time.  More time with my uterus when it wasn’t screaming to be filled with babies, more time where I just spend summers on some porch in some house in some city figuring out some way to spend my day.  But I was never that young 20 something carefree spirit I dream of having more time to be.  I worried about everything and now my 20s are ending and I just want to go back, to eat more cheeseburgers, sleep around, break more hearts, and quit more jobs at places I worked at just for fun.  Forget about resume builders and laying groundwork for “the future.”  My 20’s were exhausting and now that I realize how I could have spent them, they are gone.

So how do I enter my 30’s without dwelling in the past?  How do I enter my 40s without looking back and saying to myself, “ I should have relaxed more in my 30’s...had more cheeseburgers.”  It can't be all youth serums and eye cream from here on out...can it?

Because I am a masochist I seek comfort in the existence of moms like Kate Hudson, Kate Winslet, Jada Pinket, and Gweneth Paltrow and think well they are still young and hot and creatively productive...it's possible for me too.  So delusional I know. I know they come with a team of plastic surgeons and personal assistants but its that idea that motherhood makes you an old grown up that I am desperate to disprove.  Shallow I know. And then I realize NO!  It’s that I am on my way to becoming old and grown up, it's worse.  Its the idea that I am on my way to becoming unfuckable.  Tina Fey was just quoted in the New Yorker saying that she “has the suspicion that the definition of ‘crazy’ in show business is a woman who keeps talking even after no one wants to fuck her anymore.”  I have so much to say and I realize that youth has given me a platform with an expiration date to speak from.   And feminists around the world (myself included) can forgive for this realization and are smart enough to understand that I am not articulating a right or wrong...just what is.  The approach of unfuckableness and what that means for me is scary. I spent my entire 20's trying to be taken seriously and now...well I can't help but want to hold on to my fuckability.  Worst feminist ever?

1 comment:

  1. To be a bit contrary,

    Is there anyone who doesn't think they could have done Highschool better? Or wishes they had said something different that one time? Or wishes they had struck a different study/social life balance in College? (Or wishes they had or hadn't even gone to college?) It's easy to wish you had been more bold after you know you survived.

    We all get old, the trap is obsessing about what we missed instead of paying attention to what we are doing. I've heard more than a few old folks obsess about how great life was when the first got married before they lives were all about X, or when their kids were young, or when the kids were gone but they were sill healthy.

    Don't fetishize youth any more than our society already does. The important thing is to live your life wherever you are in it.

    ReplyDelete