Youthful Indiscretion

“Any girl under the age of 17 is the enemy. They’re going to take our jobs, our thunder, our starter husbands. They’re coming and they’re going to keep on coming, like the locusts descending on Mankato. We’ll be beating them off for the rest of our lives… the ones with the alabaster skin and perky breasts.”

                -Paris Geller of my beloved formative youth show, Gilmore Girls

I’m two weeks away from turning 32 years old. I remain sober, ten years after becoming legal, yet I still purchase the fruity bellini from Trader Joe’s for my parents’ imbibing. I still get carded – asked for my I.D. – only to have the cashier and enforcer of company policy requiring that only those of age be able to purchase an adult beverage, that his wife was the same age as I. In fact, his wife was born six months after me. She was younger than me, too. I’m a millenial and those avocado toasts are looking murkier and untouched by the Tuck Everlasting quality of acidic citrus, like a lemon that touches a cut apple prevents it from turning brown. Generation Z is making their way, and simultaneously making my social media bio, declaring me a graduate from the class of a decade past, seem more like a Wikipedia entry of a bygone encyclopedic era than an updated tagline. It’s less the fault of my generation, and more the fault of me – slithering in quicksand the more years that past as I remain unemployed, the more my eating disorder takes hold.

My eating disorder first manifested physically before it gripped me mentally. My body was deflated and an anomaly. I ended up getting taller despite an osteoporosis diagnosis, and as my body began to heal with outside intervention, baby hairs are still growing along my hairline, while I’m in my thirties. My hair is thicker than before. My breasts seem perkier than before as my body has inflated seemingly from square one. It is as if I have been reborn, grown into the nose that I was always meant to have  - the one reconstructed after I fell and shattered its entire structure at my lowest weight, running around the cold hardwood floors of my house barefoot in a feigned attempt at doing the forbidden -exercising.

I’m an anomaly – like the always-ripened avocado already cut. I’m always cold despite my weight restoration. I’m always trembling, shivering, cowering into the crew neck of my collegiate sweatshirts in the backseat of a car with open windows. My skin always looks sun kissed, but in a sickly manner – a shade of yellow that was once thought to be a beta-carotene overdose in my consumption of sumo citrus, in season between January and April, has stayed well into the end of May. Blood tests reveal nothing off kilter so yellow I remain.

But I feel my youth disappearing as my depression worsens. Perhaps its not my age that is detaching me from that girl who was once full of color and life, who had soundtracks to her life as if she were a film heroine – a protagonist with a plot unfolding in real-time. Instead, it is my sadness that is the byproduct of the eating disorder. It is hope that I feel fading away – a geriatric hopelessness that takes hold of me as if I were abandoned in an old-age home without visitors. I’m without visitors because my relationships have gone awry. I suspect my closes kin of acting on spite when they tread on the treadmill, or opt for less drops of oil. I suspect them of wanting to be a sick version of themselves –a smaller version of themselves the likes of which I had dabbled in that landed me here – jobless, never once part of a relationship, and openly, admittedly, afraid of intimacy without a libido for as long as I have been without a menstrual cycle, over a quarter of my life.  I’m an anomaly. I’m not yet fertile and as pure as the blanket of snow not yet tousled by footprints, turning 32.

I feel my youth fading in the unwillingness of my knees to levitate and perform a box jump at the gym. I feel my youth desiccating the longer the sun stays raised above the horizon once it turned spring. And yet there are bursts of youth that try in earnest to surface. My ears will perk up and I pivot on my heel as soon as I hear the ice cream truck jingle, knowing fully well that my orthorexic mind will never permit me to have added sugar and processed, metallic enclosed and churned out soft serve. The question surfaces again: is it sadness or youth gone past? And I am discovering that in my case, the case of anomaly, they coexist.

I want for nothing but the days when my parents did not wine and dine. I want for the days of food that warmed the heart, from family and flavor, from holidays and horticulture, like when we would clip the basil we grew to make a pesto sauce over pasta or the mint leaves for minty onion chutney to bathe barbecued meat in. I want for the days of my youth, of promise and progress, when meritocracy reigned supreme and working hard produced profit. I feel my youth slipping away. It is now less than two weeks, eleven days, until I turn a year older, decidedly in my thirties.

Photos of marriages and births make me recall my faith: sarbat da bhala – blessing bestowed on all. I’m happy for he, she, and they. I see promotions at jobs add up and accolades collect while I remain a virgin in so many respects, clinging to my youth as others age but seem so happy. I’m getting older, but in retrospect, I could still be young in the eyes of myself thirty years older. My sadness is ageing me. My eating disorder is eating me alive.