Do you ever feel older than the other people your age? The idea for this article came from a joke between my friends and I. One of my friends ordered a sweater which was different from her typical style. She said that she wanted to be the type of person who wear sweaters, and her first sweater happened to be in a color called “Pinot Noir.” It may seem silly, but this really got me thinking about the type of person I am, the type of person I wanted to be, and the type of person I want to be now.
I am often called an “old soul” by my biggest fan, my mother. We share a relationship filled with early morning coffee, farmers markets, and deep conversation. I am the type of person that you might imagine spends her Friday nights with a glass of Pinot Noir in a fancy armchair reading an anthology of Robert Frost poetry. I spend enormous lengths of time alone, and I’m happy that way. I don’t like comedians because I don’t usually find funny things to be funny. I can’t work technology to save my life, and you won’t ever see me as the author of an article on Her Campus about the latest meme. I often feel older than a lot of people my age, and when I compared myself to others I wanted to be more like the people who act their age.
When I think of the person I wanted to be when I came to college, I decided to be less like a 50 year old woman. I wanted to be the person who goes to parties, who gets the phone number of their cute astronomy lab partner, and the type of person other people call fun. That’s what I wanted. I tried being like that a little. I went to parties, I joined a dating app, and I started laughing at everything that everyone else laughed at. It was fun for a bit, but it was exhausting. I found myself failing at my goal of acting my own age. I skipped parties to sit and talk with my two closest friends, I never did ask my lab partner for their number, and I couldn’t fake laughter anymore. I don’t want to be the person who acts my age all the time anymore.
Now I want to be both. I want to be the girl with her cat, poetry book, and glass of wine, and I want to be the girl swaying her hips to the latest Shawn Mendes song at a party. I want to be balanced. Rather than just acting older than my age or my age all the time, I want to balance those two. Some days I want to call my mom and have a 30 minute conversation on what it means to be a good person in our day and age and some days I want to find myself in a Denny’s with a bunch of friends at 2am.
So thank you to my friend for wanting to be the type of person who wears sweaters in the color “Pinot Noir.” Even though it made me question a lot about how I’ve been living my life, the sweater looks great on you.
Follow Her Campus @ Geneseo on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest.