“Nothing but a number” my arse

Just saw this headline for a story on the Atlantic website:

I’m not a subscriber so can’t read the full article, but I can tell you that subheading if nothing else is a load of shit. I don’t think I’ve ever felt myself being any younger than I am and I certainly don’t now. If anything I find myself feeling maybe 20% older than I actually am, which is currently 48 so I feel like I’m much nearer 60 if not even more than most people my age probably do. Having a stroke at 34 will give you that sort of perspective on yourself, I suppose.

But even in my early 30s before The Incident, I was aware of myself being in my early 30s much as I am now painfully aware (and it frequently is literally painful) of being in my late 40s and on the downhill slide into the next decade. I was something of a late bloomer as a social individual (not having money to go places and do things didn’t help); when I latched onto the Sydney goth scene (thanks aus.culture.gothic) in 2001, I was already 27, and finally doing things most people would’ve already been doing for 5-10 years by that age. But even so, I wasn’t deluding myself that I was 5-10 years younger than I actually was, I knew I was 30-something and quite comfortable with that.

Though once you have an illness in your mid-30s that most people (including me before it happened) generally associate with the rather more elderly, your perception of your own age kind of alters, or at least mine did. But I appear to have always projected myself as being older than my actual age, at least online; back around 2001 or so I was a member of a now long-gone forum, and I remember one thread where we were talking about our ages, and quite a few people were stunned to find I was only in my mid-20s rather than my mid-30s (at least one of the other board members was amazed to find he was older than me). I seemed to come across like that. Perhaps I still do.

But who knows, maybe my own perception of these things is just screwy. I see some people on Youtube (D’Angelo Wallace being one) who I get the impression of being maybe in their early 30s and I’m kind of shocked to find they’re a decade or so younger than I thought. (And I feel faintly appalled that they’re so many years younger than me and so much smarter at the same time. Bastards.) And there’s one particular person on Mastodon whose posts I often see when I go through the local feed who I would’ve placed as being in his 20s. He’s thirteen. He’s barely started high school, never mind university where I thought he might be. That’s the sort of thing that makes me feel even older than I already do…