On Thursday I turn old. In my mind I'm still just a kid. For the first time in my life I understand the cosmetics industry. It always stymied me, I couldn't understand why people would do such horrible things to themselves just to artificially look younger. But I finally get it. It's not about looking younger, its about trying to get the image in the mirror to match the image in their head. No one ever feels as old as they really are. This is something I've been aware of for a while, but only now as I face my 26th year of consciousness do I understand its true importance. When I turned ten that extra digit made me nervous. I realized then that some subtle shift had occurred, that I had gained a decimal place that would stick with me for the rest of my life. Most likely, I now had all the digits that I would ever have, the finality of the thought putting my life until that point into an odd perspective, like I had joined an exclusive club that was made up primarily of people I did not yet identify with. I could only look back at my childhood and know that it was mostly over, and certainly I would never be able to go back to having just one number. When I turned thirteen I lamented the addition of such a weighty suffix to my age. In my mind, I was still getting over being a double-digiter, and all of a sudden I had to face the tidal wave of stigma associated with teenagerness. I spent the first couple of years just coming to terms with my new, more dangerous peers. Strange things happened to the face in the mirror, my visage no longer reflecting the innocence (naiveté) of my mental persona. I put off learning to drive until it was thrust upon me by peer pressure when I was 16 and a half. When my driving instructor arrived at my house for our first lesson, I had had my learner's permit for a good six months and had never been behind the wheel. Driving was for older people, not little kids like me. I completed the course and didn't take the test for months afterward. It took me a good eight months just to wrap my mind around the fact that I might be qualified to try and control one of these metal elephants. Eighteen and off to college. If not for my parents driving me to the dorm on the first day of orientation, I would still be living at home. Well, you know what I mean. Having a room of my own (more precisely a 4x8' mattress on top of the bunk bed in my triple) that was not only not attached to my house but was more than 30 miles away seemed inconceivable, if I may quote the Princess Bride. I've been in my late teens ever since. Not willing to capitulate to yet another alteration of my numbers, I mentally held off doubling that first digit. So, in my mind, I'm still 19. But now I look in the mirror and see, for all intents and purposes, a 26 year old fossil sobbing back at me. I hang on to my younger mental image not out of vanity or conceit, as I imagined the plastic-surgeoned Hollywood-istas would, but out of fright and desperation. Time moves like a pile of rubble down a slope. At first it creeps along slowly, letting us take in great views of the vast but ultimately unconsidered future. It imperceptibly picks up momentum, the bits of rubbish jostling us around a little more violently as we begin to sink into the rocky pile. Soon we can feel the breeze in our face and realize a shift is occurring, that this ride may not be as painless as we thought, that our calculations about its duration may have been slightly off. At some point a large rock smacks us in the face and we understand at once that we cannot be passive about this trip, because we are now sunk to our waists in a thick mass of hard, dense objects hurtling recklessly towards the as yet unseen but inevitable bottom. How will it turn out? Will we come to a crashing end, the rocks smashing our bones to bits as we lie helpless and broken in some dark, lonely place? Or will we slowly suffocate in the rubble, sinking to our doom, never to see the final destination we had been heading for all this time? This is the source of said fright and desperation. The great 26 on Thursday is that first unification of face and rock. I can no longer even pretend that I am still a youngster. I had all of these grand ideas about what I would do before I was old; incredible things that only young people can reasonably attempt. At least 25 was still in the first half of the 20s, and when you're in the first half, you've barely begun. I am now planted firmly in the second half, with no choice but to try to reconcile my view of myself and the real me, the things I wanted to have done vs. the things that I actually have. That's the real reason behind the cult of youth in America. It stems not from vanity, but from the very potent anxiety over our unrealized goals and ambitions.