Act your age.
This is a phrase I’m sure most of us have heard more than once. Perhaps when you were twelve and still stubbornly believed in Santa Claus, even when nobody else in your class did anymore (I swear, I heard him on the roof!). Perhaps you heard it when you were a teenager, getting into screaming matches with your mother over trivial things that blew out of proportion. Perhaps when you were eighteen and trying to convince your friends to go see that new Pixar movie that you think looks really interesting, but are trying to play it off because that voice in your head says that you’re “too old” to be excited for that kind of thing now.
Obviously, these are real examples from my own life. But just as often as I’ve heard the “act your age” line, I’ve heard the opposite—“you’re mature for your age.”
So, which is it? If you’re told one moment to stop acting like a child, and the next that you act like you’re older than you are, where is the line?
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. At the start of the year, I turned twenty-two, marking four years since I became a legal adult and… I still feel like a child. I still get overly emotional over trivial things, even if I’m able to regulate myself more now (i.e., no more screaming). I still believe in magic: Every Christmas, there’s a little what if? that rings in my mind, even as I watch my parents put gifts from Santa under the tree, written in what is obviously my dad’s handwriting. I still get excited for new Pixar movies—way more so than my nine-year-old brother does.
The difference is that now, I’m learning to embrace my inner child.
I had an “act your age” moment just the other week in Walmart. I had to pick up some vitamins, and my mother handed me a bottle of tablets—the ones you need to swallow with water. No thanks, I’m good. I told her I wanted the gummy ones. After all, they’re more fun and they taste like candy. Her response was, verbatim: “What are you, twelve?” (for reference, mother, I genuinely think this was funny).
Lately, I’ve been in the middle of a Disney obsession—meaning, I watched over a dozen films in three days. All of them were ones I’d seen before. Some were childhood favourites, like the 1992 Aladdin, and some are more recent, like Elemental. At this same time, I started reading Wings of Starlight by Allison Saft; a novelized prequel to the Disney Fairies movie Secret of the Wings. From the first page, I was instantly a child again. It’s something I would have loved when I was thirteen. It’s something that I love now—never mind that I’m no longer in the target audience for it.
I think that the older I get, the more I realize how many adults are faking “maturity”—if a line of “maturity” can even really be found. I still find joy in the same things that gave me joy as a child. I love fairytales just as much now as I did when I was six. I’ll still wander the toy aisles of Walmart. I’ll look at some children’s clothes now and wish for them to be in adult sizes. I watch my mom sing Frozen songs at full volume in the car. I watch my dad be just as excited as my youngest brother to go to Disney World (my dad has been ten times, my brother thrice). I watch my best friends go bonkers over a plushie of Toothless from How To Train Your Dragon that I crocheted.
At this point, it’s not purely childhood nostalgia that drives these emotions. You’re not “weird” or “childish” for liking these things. They bring us joy. If people in their fifties can be just as excited as people in their twenties over things that are targeted towards children, then what does it really mean to “act your age?” Why should there be some arbitrary line that dictates when you’re too old to enjoy some things? If I want to eat fruit-flavoured gummy vitamins instead of choking down a tablet, then I’m going to do just that.
You are never too mature for fun.