The Quarter Life Crisis; It’s Okay to be a Green Tomato

The other day, mid leg-wax, my beautician said to me ‘so, how old are you turning this weekend.’ I grimaced ever so slightly when responding ‘twenty-four.’ And that grimace, in case you’re wondering, was not because she ripped a strip off my right shin at that point, it was because I was dreading farewelling twenty-three. She nodded sagely, ‘ah, no wonder you don’t sound happy about it.’ The sage nod was riddled with judgement, I swear.

Now wait a minute, I thought, suddenly somewhat cross. I’m turning 24. Not 94. I still have my own teeth, and I can still run and jump and probably do a handstand if I tried. My skin is still relatively taut, and I can back up from a big night pretty damn well thank you very much. Granted these days I spend two hours on the floor with a bottle of iced tea attached to my dry lips thinking about liver damage, as opposed to during my teens when I ate a hamburger and did it all again the next night. But I am young. Very young. I’m in my early twenties. And only I’m allowed to be precious about feeling old.

She ripped another piece off my calf and sighed. ‘Yeah, I mean, I’m freaking out about turning twenty-three, I can only imagine how you’re feeling.’

Right.

It was then, as I thought how absurd she sounded, I realised how completely absurd I was sounding in my head. As she ripped a strip from my upper thigh, I tried to get a grip on myself. I was scared and full of dread because I didn’t feel like I had achieved ‘enough’. I felt like, on the eve of my twenty-fourth birthday, that time was slipping through my fingers and I wasn’t young anymore. My new label of twenty-four didn’t befit me. Essentially, I was behaving like I was headed for my death-bed having spent my entire life in a box, regretting a life of nothing. I mean, really. What was I so afraid of?

Then I thought, now hang on. If I can’t deal with birthdays now, if I’m wasting time worrying that I haven’t done enough, or achieved enough by my twenty fourth year now, then I am going to be a woeful human being. Or I will have topped myself by my twenty-eighth birthday. Or, I’ll be the friend who always celebrates their twenthy-ninth birthday, whilst clearly looking forty-five. I was already making people refer to my impending twenty-fourth as my twenty-first, I was on track to becoming someone who measures things in life by age. I was on track to becoming not only boring but somewhat neurotic. I was on track to start referring to myself as ‘twenty-something’ until I was clearly fifty-something.

So the question I want to ask is this – when did it become so necessary for us to have everything figured out by our early twenties? It’s like if you’re not in your dream job (or at least on the ladder) with your dream guy/girl with your dream mortgage by the time you hit twenty five, you’re lost. A wanderer who shouldn’t reveal their true age because everyone will start thinking ‘well Jesus, what did you do with your life?’ A vagabond of western living, doomed to pitying looks at dinner parties and sympathetic smiles at school reunions. We want to be grown ups, or at least appear that way, when we’re not really grown up at all.

I blame Gossip Girl. Well not Gossip Girl entirely, nor solely, but that genre of TV in which forty year olds look twenty-seven and act like it, sixteen year olds look twenty seven but act like thirty-five year olds, and nobody knows quite how to behave or look anymore, much less their actual age. At least in Sex and the City the girls were in their thirties and looked in their thirties as they discussed issues that used to belong to that decade of life … and which now seems to be brunch-chat fodder for 19 year olds. The episode where Samantha organises thirteen year old Jenny’s bar mitzvah springs to mind as a clever warning that Blair Waldorfs and Serena van Hoogens (what is her character’s name? I get distracted by her teeth and never hear it properly) were brewing quietly in New York City and were about to launch their assault on an entire generation via writers who have completely lost any grip they ever had on reality. Someone, bring back Francine Pascall.

Our twenties are the most talked about, reported on, represented eras of our lives – on screen, in novels, on any of MTV’s litany of scripted reality TV shows. Somewhere along the line, something has happened and the script writers who are responsible for churning out big screen adaptations of what it means to be in our twenties – which we then watch and attempt to emulate – have forgotten what their own early twenties were like (old cars, cheap wine, embarrassing fashion/flings/fantasies of what you’d be when you grew up) and are now telling us that by seventeen if we’re not front row during fashion week, pondering Yale while dressed in a blazer, hot pants, knee highs and manolos and sipping a cocktail or commenting on Mummy’s art collection with aplomb, whilst Blackberrying your childhood friend turned stalker who cruises the Upper East Side in a limousine and a scowl, then you are flailing and floundering something fierce.

But once upon a time, our early twenties, according to film, literature and rueful words of wisdom from older friends, were supposed to be all about trial and error. They were supposed to be fun. Travel filled. Embarrassing-escapade filled. Full of uncertainty and spontaneity – after all, if you can’t be spontaneous when you’re in your early twenties, then when can you be? In our twenties, we’re figuring things out, right? We’re making plans. We’re testing the waters with all ten toes and finding out what works and what doesn’t. Hell, if you’re female, you’re not even in your prime of life yet, in your early twenties, you’re still on the up.

So why on earth was I so bitter about and scared of turning twenty-four?

We put so much emphasis on achieving young and reaching yardsticks and milestones by certain ages, that we lose perspective. People go out of their way to do something not because they’re good at it, or because they’ve worked at it for years and are deserved of the attention and praise – but because they’re young and it looks good on the resume. No one is letting themselves ripen, letting experience seep into their bones, their thought processes, their perceptions of the world around them. We’re in a huge hurry to grow up and ring in the big 2-5 with a life partner, the perfect apartment, the perfect job and a life that reads like something out of a Sunday magazine profile. And I was freaking out because I was staring down quarter of a century with only half my boxes ticked.

It’s like, suddenly, no one wants to be a green tomato for a while. Oh sure we want to look like a green tomato, all taut and shiny, but we want the red tomato’s life, and we want it earlier than ever. We’re in such a hurry to do as much as we can before we turn twenty-five, we are so focussed on ticking the boxes and getting The Perfect Life before we hit a quarter of a century and have a mini-crisis because we’re only on question ten (do you have an investment property?) that we’re forgetting to just live and let live. We’re actually scared of getting older, but acting older than ever before. When did this happen? It used to be fortieth birthdays that people needed a large amount of vodka to survive, now it’s twenty-fourths and twenty-fifths – the pressure to have done it all by twenty-five is palpable.

John Mayer sang, rather precociously, of a quarter-life crisis on one of the songs on Room For Squares. I am writing a column about tomatoes. The discrepancy in eloquence is painfully obvious. But to John and all those dreading this needless crisis, I say, buck up. We have our whole lives to be red tomatoes. It’s inevtiable we’re all going to end up that way – having breakdowns every time we get a year older isn’t going to change that. Putting those dirty great big milestones in place and setting a date and time for when you reach them is only going to make you dreadfully unhappy.

A coffee with a friend who should work part time as a guru, snapped me out of my precious depression. She is looking forward to turning twenty five. She’s proud of what she’s achieved so far, and she’s looking forward to what she’ll achieve down the track. It is, my friends, as simple as that.

Whether or not I have ticked all the boxes by this time next year, and I severely doubt I will have, at this moment in time, I say, it’s okay to be green for a while.

Image of the green tomatoes (one of which is the author) is by Brent and MariLynn on Flickr