Age is a pretty relative thing, if you think about it. At sixteen you're seen as "old" by someone who is only five, but in the eyes of someone aged sixty, geez, you're still just a little kid. No one really "acts their age" in the strictest sense, at least not all the time. The date on our birth certificate tells our chronological age (well, except my Grandma's, but that's the Nazi's fault),. But it doesn't necessarily speak as to how old we are emotionally, physically, spiritually. A person who is forty-something can act or feel like a ten year old, or vice versa.

When i was in eighth grade, a local paper did a story on me (for skating, what else?), and the woman wrote that "listening to this young woman talk, it is obvious that [name] is wise beyond her thirteen years." The accompanying pictures make me look nine or ten, since you can't tell my height. Even as recently as a few months ago i was being mistaken for a sixteen year old one minute due to appearance and a thirty-something ten minutes later presumably due to demeanor.

Story of my life. Complicated by the fact that i've never really felt my age, either.  If anything i feel decidedly split. Often i practically revert back to being a younger kid. It ranges from all-out flashbacks to milder forms of just "feeling" a certain age because of some random trigger. The four year old being molested, the sixteen year old sitting at her mother's funeral, the eighteen year old (feeling like an eight year old) paralyzed with fear as an older man in the psych ward starts kissing and fondling her. Various other prts might be different ages as well. It's almost as though certain areas of development were arrested during those times and left behind as the rest of me continued to grow up. Or as if there are simply younger "selves" that were never discarded, older "selves" just grew over them. The younger selves are still there, albeit lurking deeper within, and sporadically decide to make their presence known and/or felt. (I don't have an actual dissociative disorder, it just feels like it sometimes.)

Yet oddly enough, a bigger part of me feels... well, almost ancient. Perhaps this is from where the "mature" demanor stems. Now, twenty-one is relatively youthful by most people's standards. So as Garth Brooks says, "I'm much too young to feel this damn old!" Perhaps part of this is so many years of skating -- where at eighteen you're "over the hill" and practically "geriatric" by your mid-twenties -- but there's got to be more to it. Can't put my finger on it exactly. It's as though i know too much, seen too much, lost too much of that initial innocence. Like a major rt of me decided to bypass young adulthood altogether and skip ahead to being forty, or fifty, or older. It's hard to explain.

Grandma likes to think i'm so "mature" because i was "raised right." Ye-es, i was raised to be polite and obedient, but that doesn't explain feeling like an old woman. Years ago the team trainer made a comment that i must be so mature for my age "since you've been through so much." (The way he said it, it sounded as though he were pitying me for having lived a horribly traumatic existence. Which led me to wonder what the heck it is he thinks i've "been through." My mom is common knowledge, but that's about it.) That doesn't seem right, either. Life hasn't been exactly carefree, but really, whose is?

One of my old therapists seemed to think that since i was "forced to grow up too fast," it was understandable that "you would feel torn between wanting to go back to a younger age or skip forward to full maturity." Dissonance between a part that knows i should really start to "grow up" and another part that says, "Hey, wait a minute, i never got a real chance to be a kid!" But all things considered, i had it pretty good, and don't think i was necessarily robbed of an entire childhood. Meh. Perhaps she does have a somewhat valid point. Or maybe i just have an old soul.

Which part, if any, is actually twenty-one? Hard to say. Of course, i will be at least chronologically twenty-two by the time that puzzle is figured out, and of course by then i won't know which part of me is actually twenty-two!

Oh well. One thing is for sure, mental/emotional age has little to do with how many times you've been around the sun.