Projecting Projectiles
Baby 'til you have a baby.
OCTOBER
At last, your favorite month is here, Virgo. The rare time of year during which you enjoy a packed schedule (to you that is two commitments a week) and endless socializing (to you that is one social event per week).
At a party this month you’ll find what you believe to be the right corner for your particular limitations as a party guest. With warm lighting, in a slightly quieter room than where the food is, you’ll strike up a pleasant conversation with a stranger. Parties can be overwhelming, and when you find a safe person to chat the night away with, you cling to them with an otherwise disproportionate fervor. Please don’t go to the bathroom, your pleading eyes beg, I can’t start over at this party—not again. In her eyes you see a similar wanting, so you dive into a lengthy conversation.
Sharing a life raft for over an hour, you cover a cornucopia of topics. You discuss your jobs (hers: finance, yours: working in a restaurant), creative pursuits (hers: ceramics, yours: writing and putting on a deranged, quarterly live show) relationships (both: married to men), home life (her: two kids, you: no kids) etc. Due to the circumstances, you project perhaps unfair impressions onto the conversation. For example, that you both are taking each other equally seriously.
Eventually, she says, “Well, you’re a twenty something…” and you’ll say, “No, I am 32.” And she will disregard this correction with a hand wave as she says, “Same thing.”
This woman is older than you. At 32, you are finally at an age in which you, too, know people who are younger than you. And you know that when you’re talking to people younger than you, occasionally you feel a small wave of internal panic about the passage of time. However, that doesn’t usually inspire you to make the young people feel ridiculous or small when they share their ideas with you. In fact, you’re usually just grateful that a young person wants to share their earnest thoughts with you at all! (Even though they grew up in an era of high-waisted pants, and therefore come from a deep, unreliable position of privilege.)
You try to tell yourself that this is an innocent comment—that she didn’t mean to insult you—so you shrug in passive agreement that communicates, Sure, being 32 is somehow no different than being a 23 year old and you quickly depart the punctured, sinking, conversational liferaft.
Like most of the time when you swallow your ire, you inevitably choke on the hastily disposed rage and spend the following days heimleich-ing yourself through rigorous exploration of her comment.
To drill down on what offended you most, perhaps we should first clarify the meaning of “twenty something.” To you (and you think, culture at large), a twenty something refers to a person who is within the interchangeable early years in their twenties which are devoted to figuring themselves out. It’s a time of crucial—often vulgar—self discovery. It’s a time for mohawks, it’s a time for improv. It’s a time to read an article about something and then repeat what you read with a big attitude like you thought of it. It’s a time to assume that people who disagree with you are sheep. It’s a time when one sleeps with so many coworkers it’s as if they’ve been given a directive from on high. It’s a time devoted to self-sabotage in the name of experience, a time destined for UTIs and projectile vomiting. A time for small, daily humiliations.
To you, a person’s graduation from a twenty something has more to do with their personal path than any particular age, but most people you know crawl out far before they hit their 30’s. And you include yourself among those ranks, Virgo. Long ago you left your pound of flesh at the altar of frenetic, twenty something self discovery. As a 32 year old woman with no sudden mohawk intrigue, many years projectile vomit-free, and a chaste relationship with all colleagues, you know that those years are behind you.
Let me be clear, all a person can hope for is that their personal insights and self discovery continue their whole lives, but it’s important to go through the nauseous stages of personal development (twenty something) to reach the gentler stages (everything else hopefully).
It would be different if the woman said you look like you’re in your twenties, but to you, the “twenty something” comment related more to behavior than appearance.
The comment leaves you feeling a little dismissed by the woman, as if throughout your entire conversation she’d been viewing you as a wayward hooligan while you thought you’d been connecting. When you reflect on the conversation you shared with this woman, you don’t see any evidence of a twenty something. Though I typically view you through a less flattering lens, I can’t help but agree with you. If you weren’t acting like a twenty something, then her opinion of this must have been gleaned through the content of what you shared. You’ll wonder what would have made her view you as an adult. If you were a Mother, or had more of a capital C Career, would she see you in a different light?
In the Parenthood or Career binary, it can already feel feeble to declare that you have neither. While waitressing (I know I’m supposed to call it serving, and I will when other people do it, but when you do it it’s waitressing), one particularly insistent young Mother has twice told you that you may change your mind about not wanting children. You want to tell her that she might also change her mind (and your hypothetical change in perspective would be significantly easier to remedy than hers). You wonder if this is the sort of statement she would make to a person working in a corporate environment. Are nine to fivers believed when they say they don’t want children? Are CEOs? Who is believed when they say that they do not want children?
You used to ask people at which moment they became an adult. After a short while, you abandoned this question because you realized that it basically came across as, “Tell me your worst trauma—the big one.” Gruesome and invasive as the question was, it interested you to hear the inner workings of growth in the people you knew. Friends shared stories of the erosion of their naivety and others recalled early experiences of moving independently through the world, but not one person talked about becoming an adult because they Got The Job or Birthed The Baby.
If you can’t work in a restaurant and become an adult, you’d better get knocked up quick, Virgo, so you can begin to receive respect from traditional, casually cruel people at parties. Just kidding! Don’t you remember that the central tenet of womanhood is that you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t? If you got pregnant everyone would start talking about how unprepared for parenthood you are, or how you obviously don’t value your career enough, or that your maternity clothes aren’t as cute as expected. And if you became a corporate baddie, people would ask when you were going to start a family. There is simply no way to appease judgmental people at parties, Virgo, so stop trying.
Next time you’re accused of being wayward on the (implied) grounds of your childlessness and livelihood, feel free to enforce their beliefs by reanimating one of your most practiced behaviors during your twenty something years: projectile vomit. There’s nothing wrong with spreading rumors about yourself, Virgo, so go ahead and let those traditional party goers believe you’re exactly who they think you are by projectile vomiting anywhere you please. Your accuser will leave with the swell of confidence from being correct, and you’ll get reacquainted with a beautiful part of your past. Everyone wins!
wow what a spot-on description of the implications of "twenty something"