On Being a Grown Woman

As an American woman, you may be a girl-gone-wild, or a biologically-ticking-40. But except perhaps for six months after your 21st birthday, your age is like Goldilocks’s porridge. Too young, too old. Never just right.

A man’s age, on the other hand, is always right. In Letters to a Young Contrarian, a 52-year-old Christopher Hitchens wondered when he would no longer be called an angry young man. Men like Hitchens go from bad boy to elder statesman.

For me, many of the privileges of getting older have been bound up with getting cash. As an artist, I’ve done better than most. Each year I’ve managed to hack together more opportunities, and paint with more mastery, until one day, I realized I was no longer flailing just to stay afloat. Being 30 is sweet. Saying I was 30 I pointlessly despised.

Artist Molly Crabapple writes for VICE on how she feels about turning 30 now that she’s done it, despite how much everyone made her worry about losing her youth, beauty, innocence, and so on. (I am turning 30 in approximately 165 days but I think all of those respective ships sailed somewhere around 26.) In the end, Crabapple realizes, losing your innocence, owning your shit, and becoming a grown woman is after all, not really a bad thing. Preach.

And if you didn’t read the essay she published a few months ago, Filthy Luchre, do it now!

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