I am twenty-five years old. I'm trying not to be, but there are some things that you can't change about yourself. I'm sitting in the library of my new campus and I'm wondering when I became a man in the eyes of others. It was probably more than seven years ago. I haven't accepted the reality yet. I don't feel like a man. Does anyone? What does it mean to feel like an adult?
I caught myself in the mirror just a minute ago. I looked at this weird guy with no beard and a wisp of full, blonde hair tousled to the side and a big, heavy black backpack strapped to his shoulders. I looked at him and I stood as still as ice. I looked at his body. Tall, slender, not fat but not terribly in shape either. I looked at his face. It had big lines crossing his cheeks tangent to the deepening bags under his eyes. It had stubble that would never, ever be fully shaved no matter the sharpness of the razor. It had a fierceness to it. It had a desperation that I'd never noticed before. A hunger.
I stared at this strange man and I looked at his hands. They dangled there, still and tense but so far from his shoulders that they just looked silly. He looked like a carnival stilt-walker who had forgotten to take off his extensions before going to school. His hands were big but skeletal and, without warning, one of them twitched. I felt the twinge and realized, with sudden profundity, that the man I was staring so blankly at was me.
Seven years of failure, heartbreak and disaster came back to my mind. I traced them in the wear and tear on my face and body. I traced them through my memories, thinking back to the versions of myself I have seen in the mirror over the years. Half-images and visions of times that I finally learned to fight. Moments in which I gathered myself up from the heap in which I had laid and dragged myself forward. Periods of pain. Periods of strife and stress. Things that I'll never forget because they have left deep, ragged lines in my psyche. Heartbreak, depression, loss, fear. Things that I have traditionally used to define myself.
I saw these things and I shook them away in order to get another look at myself. I looked again at the lines in my face and thought of that pain with, surprisingly, pride. I surveyed the wreckage of my past selves and found them wanting, shamed in the face of the man that I have become. Most people hate themselves, and their faces. They hate that life has etched itself irrevocably into their flesh. They feel out of control. Impotent. They have not learned to look at themselves.
My hand twitches again in the unflattering fluorescent lighting of the bathroom and I feel power. I feel redemption and freedom when I look into the ever-deepening curves and lines of my face. I have earned these lines. I have survived and gained the furrowed brow of a man haunted. I have fought and I will continue to fight against... well, myself. No matter how many scars it takes.
Maybe I feel like a man after all.
