Adult Face

This summer I had a traumatic epiphany which I subsequently forgot about until two weeks ago and I thought it might be worth sharing with the masses or whatever.

I was back home living with my parents for the summer when I happened upon some pictures of me from my childhood. I was fucking adorable (they were from approx. 1992-1996, the height of my cuteness, none  of that bullshit fugly me that came after). I sat there in my father's den thinking "what the fuck happened to me?! I had so much potential and it all worked out to this? What a shit deal".

I carried the photo over to the full length mirror in the hall and put it up next to my face for comparison. I stared into the mirror and thought to myself: "There's still hope! That potential must be in there somewhere!" Then it hit me. There was no hope. This is it...this is my adult face and it's as good as it's going to get.

I'm sure some of you out there are thinking: "You're not an adult, you're only 21! You're basically still a child!" And you're probably right considering I am still confused for a 16 year old and constantly carded, not just at bars or the liquor store, but occasionally for R rated movies due to my small stature and child-like features. But to a child, reaching your 20's was synonymous with being an adult, as such, I would have considered my current self old. And as a dishearteningly awkward and unattractive child of 10 (this "phase" continued until I finally replaced my glasses with contacts and got rid of my braces...though who's to say it's truly over even now?) I nurtured a secret hope that I would one day blossom into a mature and beautiful woman; that this horrible time in my existence could be justified as the ugly duckling intermediate to my swan adult face.

All I could do was look and the mirror and think: "This? This is what I've been waiting for!? What the kind of fucking cruel joke is this?! It can only get worse from here, wrinkles and shit!" I took one last hard look at myself...and burst into tears.

That was how my mother found me, sitting in the front hall and sobbing, clutching the picture to my chest. It was not my finest moment (though definitely not my worst in that hall). My mother, full of maternal sympathy asked me what was wrong and once I had managed to choke it out she looked at me with the expression normally saved for when I come home a drunken mess and told me to get a hold of myself before leaving for her evening tennis.

Every once in a while though I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror and am again disappointed by my sad excuse for an adult face...that is until I switch the channel to 16 and Pregnant and joyfully think, who cares what I look like?! At least I'm not them, bitch has a fucking baby! At 21 I can officially say I beat teen pregnancy, I win and all those Farrah's and Amber's out there can suck it! It's hard to feel down on yourself after that.