Too many bread crumbs

Next month I’m turning forty-six. Forty-f’ing-six. That’s forty … plus six. And you know what that means, right? It’s just a quick downward slide to 50, and don’t even get me started on 50.

But I don’t think this whole aging thing would be quite so bad if it weren’t for two things. Number one, I don’t look or act my age. I know — wah wah wahhh, you look young, bitch — but that’s not exactly what I mean. I have young features, young … bone structure, whatever, but it’s all covered in very obviously aging skin. I’m like “a total Manet” (to quote the movie Clueless): fine from far away but when you get up close it’s all wrinkles and confusing incoherencies. Sometimes I can actually see it in people’s expressions as they get closer to me, the moment they notice the crow’s feet and sagging jowls and the waddle and their mind tries to make sense of it all. Like that portrait in the haunted house at Disney where the young woman turns old before your eyes.

I also sound much younger than I am, which is due mainly to an extreme lack of confidence. When you’re nervous, your voice gets higher, and I’m almost always nervous. And as for not acting my age, I’ve been wondering if that’s actually a result of not looking and sounding my age, or if it’s just a bizarre coincidence. The former makes sense — I’m constantly treated like I’m younger than I am, and being a pathological people-pleaser, I feel the need to act the age that people seem to think I am. Or, the more likely explanation: I’m just really immature. In any case, realizing that you’re about to be forty-six when you feel twenty-six is a real bitch-slap.

And all that is only number one. Number two — appropriately enough — is really shitty: I haven’t figured out what I want to be when I grow up. In the 25 years since graduating college, I have had so many false starts down so many completely different career paths. If Hansel and Gretel’s problem was that the birds ate all their bread crumbs and they couldn’t find their way back, my problem is that there are just too damn many bread crumbs at this point. Maybe it’s unrealistic to think that I could ever get back to the “me” who first started out on this journey called finding a career. There’s a very good chance that person doesn’t exist anymore, but somehow I feel like that’s what I need to do. If all of those career paths were the wrong ones, then doesn’t that mean that following them, for however long, took me further away from myself?