My older brother Jason looks young for his age. He’s actually four years older than me, but my friends think that’s he’s my age. I have to remind them that I’m the 23-year-old. Just last week, someone asked him when he was graduating college. And to my horror, a saleslady once called me his Ate. I felt like I was in a Stresstabs commercial as I stood there gaping at her and my brother gleefully guffawed in the dressing room. Needless to say, I never shopped there again.
I used to get a kick out of people thinking I was older than I actually was. I was a pretty tall pre-pubescent lass, and people were shocked when I declared that I was in grade school, not high school as they had expected. I thought my height and demeanor made me look mature, and that made me feel pretty awesome. Older, to me, looked knowledgeable, independent, and sophisticated.
When I did get older, I realized that it also looked pimply, tired, and stressed. I did not escape the acne brought on by puberty, the eyebags from late nights of studying, and the extra pudginess from gorging on junk food. I finally realized why my mother still declares her age to be 35 years old. (A conversation about my mother’s age goes something like this, to paraphrase the Twilight trailer: “How old are you?” “Thirty-five.” “And how long have you been thirty-five?” “A while.”) Honestly, 23 is way too young to be worried about getting old, but in this age of anti-aging creams and treatments, we are always forced to evaluate ourselves against our younger selves. The mirror must not reflect the harsh reality of our fine lines and wrinkles, but the flawless and supple skin that we had 10 years ago.
However, it’s more than just our skin that makes us yearn for our younger years, but our state of mind as well. We always think we’re so stressed — until a year passes by and we realize that last year was nothing compared to this year! We all want to go back to a time when we hardly studied and got good grades, when a bad project didn’t mean you could get fired, or when you worried about and worked for no one but yourself. The older we get, the more “life stuff” we have to handle, and it’s only when we look up when we realize where we are in life. (That’s where the fine lines and wrinkles come in.) The holidays, no matter how fun and festive they are, always remind me that I’m getting older when I see my relatives. I still remember how my cousins and I would rambunctiously play around the house during our Christmas lunches. Together, we willingly sang Christmas carols for crisp P20 bills, devised devious plans to prove whether Santa was real or not, and shared our new toys with each other. In the recent years, my cousins and I languidly sit around talking while our younger cousins run around.
The older cousins have long stopped singing Christmas carols, so to remind us of past Christmas party performances, my parents pulled out an old tape this week. We laughed at our classic Hagibis-inspired presentation in 1994, but I was horrified to discover that they had also taped me practicing for an oral recital. I looked ridiculous reciting a poem from memory with the most literal actions ever, and I probably thought I was rocking it. I probably got a high grade for that back in grade four, but it just looked so funny. Plus, my dad kept pointing out that I had buck teeth, which I totally did not. It made me so ecstatic that I was done with all that, that I survived that stage and now know so much better. I realized that I don’t even have to look as far as grade school. Reading through my high school diary will probably fill me with relief that I’m now in my 20s.
When we look back, sometimes our eyebags and wrinkles are better than the naïveté and imprudence that we didn’t know we had before. We may lose the glowing skin, lightning-fast metabolism, and carefree attitude, but the growing part of growing old brings me so much in exchange. Wisdom. Independence. Proficiency. Audacity. Experience. And finesse. The finesse to brush it off when I get called my kuya’s ate. Of course, at 23, I think it’s perfectly understandable if I haven’t developed it yet.