I'm Not 23 Yet, but I will be

"Lelaina: I was really gonna be something by the age of 23.
Troy: Honey, the only thing you have to be by the age of 23 is yourself.
Lelaina: I don’t know who that is anymore." -Reality Bites

Next week I turn 23 years old. I may or may not be something by next week, Wednesday to be exact. In October when I came home for the weekend of my cousin Maureen's wedding I had a 23rd birthday party, off the cuff, at a hibachi restaurant called Mikasa Sukasa. Really I was just out with some cohorts of mine, and they decided all at once without planning that it was my birthday. The slew of Japanese waiters sang me their version of "Happy Birthday," I ate a pineapple with cocktail umbrellas in it, and was sad that I was so old.

It's weird that I'm actually going to be that old pretty soon. The funny thing is, I'm pretty sure 40-something-year-old moms and dads or even 30-year-old unmarrieds think, "Psh! Brigid, you're so young!" But not my parents. No, for them I'm never actually my own age, I'm either the 4-year-old version ["Do you need to get tucked in?"], 15-year-old version ["Brigid, stop being so hostile."] or 30-year-old version of myself ["Why don't you have your own business, job, house? Make sure you have a kid before you're too old."]. For real, this all happens. Seriously.

But I do think it would probably be quite difficult to be away from their kid for so long that they missed those actual maturation years in college, years where they couldn't be there, otherwise there might not have been such a drastic change. So, now that I'm home, there's this sort of push and pull where they don't know how old my age should equate to their treatment of me, or really any of my five siblings. [See our recently implemented 12 a.m. curfew for week nights and 2 a.m. on weekends. For real. I need to leave.]

It would all have been much easier if I actually was allowed by our ailing society to become the "something by the time I was 23." Unfortunately, Troy's response is true, but is something incomprehensible to myself and the Larry/Sheila Duo. And Lelaina's response makes it all the better, because for me, "I don't know who that is anymore" either.