Last week I saw Me and You and Everyone We Know with JH. Excellent movie, by the way, despite (or perhaps because of) lots of discussion of poop. But what it really made me notice is how, sometime in the last few years, I crossed that crucial line between identifying more with kids and identifying more with adults.
Me and You has an ensemble cast, including a handful of adults, three teenagers, and a little boy. I usually expect myself to identify with the teenagers — still figuring out who they are, a little fragile and a little stubborn while they try out all the “adult” things for the first time. My internal age has hovered around 15 for a long time. Largely because I was a late bloomer where those “adult” things were concerned, and because like most adults who were too self-aware as adolescents, junior high and high school still loom disproportionately large in my emotional landscape. Reading nothing but YA novels probably doesn’t help, either.
But this time, I saw the kids as an adult would. I worried about them, about the adults they would grow up to be if they made the choices they were making. It was the adults who were my little screen avatars. My internal age caught up with my physical age, and I didn’t even notice.
JH pointed out that it might be because I’ve professionalized my relationship with kids. And he’s right. I have a choice going into my career as a school librarian. I can keep the internal age of my students, with all the “oh, I want those girls to like me; they’re popular” instincts that come with that. Or I can think of myself as a teacher, an adult, and project that to my kids so they’ll actually listen to me and respect me. (Er, I hope.)
But I do feel like I’ve lost something. An empathy, a connection. I hope it’ll balance out to be a good thing.
Comment: When did you cross that line?
3 responses so far ↓
1 colorwheel // Jul 19, 2005 at 2:58 am
i often feel like i’m six.
line? what line?
2 Jeff // Jul 19, 2005 at 10:08 am
I still think of myself in my early twenties, even though I’m closer to thirty now (cue the Logan’s Run scene from Free Enterprise). I think that’s mostly that I interact socially with more people who are younger than me (Keri’s college friends, mostly), because a lot of the things I’m interested in (comics, YA lit, gaming) are still viewed as children’s activities, and because I’m not planning on doing the “settle down and raise kids” thing that I see other people my age doing.
I think the line for me is a moving one. I’ve always just felt a few years behind other people my age, and would have done a lot better in whatever setting I’d left (except for law school; if I’d waited a couple of years instead of panicking about that, I would’ve realized that it wasn’t for me and saved a bunch of debt.) I can’t tell, though, if this is just one of those “if I knew then what I know now” things that’s probably true for everyone.
3 anna // Jul 20, 2005 at 12:40 am
“Reading nothing but YA novels probably doesn’t help, either.”
ya think??
i feel like that would make a huge difference.
and i don’t know if i’m allowed to say this, but i’ve felt earlymidtwenties for a long, long time. which isn’t to say i was actually so mature or grown up, but that’s certainly how i identified. when i was six and expected to run around with the other kids, i was more interested in the grown ups. i’ve was always “little professor” and “too serious” and substantially hindered from relating to people in junior high and high school.
but now that i’m 24 and more or less balanced my internal and external ages, will my internal age move forward with the external? or will i be 40 and not related to my peers because i’m still 25? :p
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