Dorian Gray

At the risk of sounding really smug, I’m sick of looking young. They should introduce legislation to outlaw perceived-age based discrimination. I constantly get asked at work if I’ve just come out of university – no, I’m thirty-fucking-one and a bit. My ex-boyfriend’s mum darkly enquired: 'is your new girlfriend legal?' after first being introduced to me. He was younger than me! It was worse when I trowled on the face paint in an effort to look sexy. ‘Now you look 12’, she’d laugh.

I was sitting on the tram this morning when I recognised a balding, suited man as a guy who’d been in my year at university. When I realised that he was the age I ought to look, I felt peculiar. I’m sure he’s the guy that bosses the kiddies that look my age around at some top tier firm. I’m sure he owns a string of properties tenanted by pink-haired kids who have discovered PIL, the Sugarcubes and the Wire where I might have been doing the same 15 years ago. His face wore the heavy expression of years of grimacing through tedious mediations, binge drinking at office functions and dragging on the B&H and the odd cuban at business lunches. For a moment I felt I was Dorian Gray – looking at a gnarled representation of how I feel underneath my childlike features. And believe me I have lived hard enough to look like Phillip Ruddock on a week-long ritalin bender.

Being a young looking sheila is not the ticket all those tight-faced LA types with their tits hoisted up to their earlobes would have you believe. At least, not in an office block in Melbourne. I recently got a promotion to a fairly average job from a very shitty one at my organisation, and there were many there who thought I’d risen far above the position I looked most suitable for – that of intern/office junior/clerk. Twenty-three year olds ask me if I remember movies I saw before they were born. Nineteen year old barmaids ask me for ID before blanching at the truth, ducking glasses I lob at their right-age-looking heads. You think I want to look young? I don’t. On the inside I’m old, I’m ropey and I feel I’ve lived a thousand sad lives filled with rich and bitter disappointment. I want the respeck – and yes, I want the sympathy, that goes with people realising that.

It probably doesn’t help that I still dress like a 70s teenager and have an impossibly round, smiley, dopey face with an expression that shrieks ‘I don't do responsibility’ and looks as if it should be saying ‘would you like fries with that?’ – yet yearns to quote pretentiously from a life spent reading, tinkering, listening, watching, dancing, philandering – a life spent accumulating useless knowledge and psychological disorders which should have long since started to show on my face goddammit.. Am I starting to sound a little disingenuous now? Wanna punch me yet? Oh well. Youthful appearance is of little consolation when youth itself has gone. Remember that, kids.