Id

                Wisdom doesn’t always come with time, it comes with experience. It takes wisdom in the first place to be able to cram a whole bunch of experiences into a short amount of time, but it can be done.

                So now my age meant nothing extremely worthy, and it prompted me to wonder who else’s did either. I know a beauty therapist in her thirties who looks like the average thirty-five year old, because she has always known how to take care of herself. People are always mistaking her for younger, so just because she has been alive for fifty years, does that mean she should be thrown into the fifty-year-old category?

                It gets under my skin, to think that the majority of what makes up our day-to-day life is determined by our age only.

                On my 18th birthday I came to the conclusion that everybody else decides our age, not us. And we let them. Age is a barrier when you’re young because there are so many legal boundaries. When you grow older, however, you have the freedom to decide how old you want to be by social standards. If you have been alive for 80 years and can’t go out because you sit in you chair all day and have brittle bones, then you did that to yourself and society accepted it because of your age. If you have lived for 80 years and run a successful business to this day, then you are congratulated. Because you haven’t fallen into the pattern; the stereotype of what a person of that age is allowed to be. We have the option of choosing what age we are. How old are you? If you have been alive for forty years, that doesn’t mean you are forty years old. If you have been alive for ninety years, it doesn’t mean you have lived for ninety years, if the last ten have consisted of nothing but daytime TV and feeling sorry for yourself while you wait to die.

                The thought of a whole planet living day by day on what their age says they should do and what they should be makes me want to go around shaking people.

                My ID says I’m 18, and that will change as the clock ticks on. But man made clocks, and man made my ID. How many years I have been alive is only a fact, and that will also change with time. But age is just a state of mind and man did not make my mind. When somebody says, “act your age”, they mean it. Because that’s all it is: acting.