Image: Paramount/IMDB.com
In 2017, on my first day as a staff writer at Australian online youth-media publication Junkee, I worried that I was too old for the role I’d been hired for. I waited nervously in the hip start-up style plywood panelled reception, hoping no one would notice how uncool and out of touch I was.
I was in a moment of tragic yet expansive opportunity. My eleven-year relationship had ended, I’d been made redundant from a full-time job, and I’d spent a year wandering between Melbourne and Sydney, looking for purpose. For a variety of reasons—including some chronic health issues, including being in the closet for a long time, including a firm commitment to hobbies practiced by lonely little Victorian-era lads with robust imaginations and no friends—I’d found myself in the unenviable position of worrying that I was… boring. I felt boring.
I was achingly aware of the fact that I was in my thirties, starting an entry-level role at a youth media publication.
My desire to become a journalist had manifested comparatively late in life, a direction that had only revealed itself to me in my thirties after I’d tried my hand at several other ‘careers’. When you decide to study ‘creative writing’ at university, you’re equally unqualified for basically every job in the world, and I’d spent some time marketing e-books, captioning ABC shows for the hard of hearing, having knives thrown at me in seedy bars. I’d made mazes for toddlers, sold expensive wine to jet-setting businessmen and run the social media account for a large truck company.
Finally, I’d landed what I considered my dream job—a chance to write nonsense articles about silly little things I’d watched on TV and be paid for it. Online journalism seemed like a fun and relatable way of being exploited by capitalism. It had been around long enough to be featured in pop culture as a recognisable trope—represented in shows like The Bold Type or lampooned in comedies such as Bojack Horseman, and often in a way that seemed generally desirable to me as a thing to do with my life, and much better than tweeting from the perspective of one of Australia’s largest freight services. But I was achingly aware of the fact that I was in my thirties, starting an entry-level role at a youth media publication.
As I was standing there, talking myself down from my fears of elderly decrepitude, one of my new co-workers, wearing a backwards cap and sneakers, eating a packet of chips for breakfast, casually skateboarded out of the elevator and into the office. Nobody blinked an eye. I decided then and there to lie shamelessly about my age from now on. I decided to become younger.
*
To tell the truth, I’d long been someone who had obsessed over age. I think it’s a common insecurity for people in creative fields, who are often given a brief window to succeed. In my early reviews I was referred to twice as a ‘wunderkind’, a description you can only hold onto proudly for a very short time before it gets wildly embarrassing. The older you get, the more you watch prizes and funding and opportunities diminish into the distance. One of the saddest years of my life was ageing out of the ‘cool’ young writers’ festival—now I’d be forever stuck with the red-beaded kaftan audiences of the regular ones.
I’d long been someone who had obsessed over age. I think it’s a common insecurity for people in creative fields, who are often given a brief window to succeed.
My decision to change my age wasn’t entirely without influence—in the lead-up to starting the new job, I’d binged three seasons of the US comedy-drama Younger. (I’m very suggestible to prompts from episodic TV shows—I put my obsession with tiny sandwiches and pithy insults down to watching Downton Abbey).
In Younger, Liza Miller, a newly divorced mum in her forties, pretends to be 26-years-old to get a job in the competitive New York book publishing industry. There’s a Shakespearian level of farce in the initial premise. The idea that people believe her quickly shows its thinness when held up to the harsh light of almost literally any scrutiny. The show throws a hundred hurdles for Liza and her lies to vault over every season—she is blackmailed multiple times, blackmails other and is always a single misstep away from being revealed as an ancient liar.
Much of the ‘joke’ of Younger is the idea of a forty-year-old mum infiltrating millennial culture. She is quizzed on her favourite member of One Direction, laughed at when she admits she doesn’t know who Lena Dunham is. She is a fish out of water in a new world of Instagram and celebrity juice cleanses. Luckily, I was deeply immersed in pop culture, my brain rotten with memes and online ephemera, my only real qualification in life being too many thoughts about Gilmore Girls. And I’ve always looked several years younger than I am (not necessarily in a hot way, more like a creepy un-ageing cherub with adult acne), and I’m a compulsively snappy dresser.
However, I had a robust understanding of the absurdity and ludicrous vanity of what I was doing. I reflected this by never committing as fully to the scam as Liza—I had rules, mitigations, meaning I was endeavouring more of a soft obfuscation than an outright lie. I merely changed my age to 31, a pointless and bland age that nobody would ever question. (I had some ethical qualms midway through the project when I was putting my age in the dating apps and decided to tell the truth to romantic partners in order to stay out of the catfishing territory.) Mostly, if people asked me my age, I’d say ‘31 with the rebrand’, creating such an air of confusion and mystery that even people who knew about my project got lost and uncertain.
I merely changed my age to 31, a pointless and bland age that nobody would ever question.
Like Liza in Younger, I immediately loved my new job. Junkee had an air of barely contained chaos and fun. But, as in Younger, it quickly became clear that the goal of having a job to survive is almost an excuse. Because sure, Liza is broke, cleared out by her gambler ex. But what Liza really needs is to change her life. So after she gets the job she continues the scam because her new age gives her access to a passion for existence that she hasn’t felt in a long time. And so it was with me.
It was genuinely not about age and all about opportunity. Young people are synonymous with opportunity because all they are able to do is grow, to experience new things, to become something. What Liza and I were trying to do was steal that energy, bottle that mutability like a billionaire hoarding vials of delicious virgin blood, so that we could strategically and joyously grow in ways that would help us become people comfortable and powerful in themselves.
*
I knew my scam would only work if I was able to mimic the lifestyle of my younger colleagues. So, I invented a rule to force me into a young mindset: I would simply say ‘yes’ to anything I was offered—opportunities, invitations, another drink, whatever. Like the old old improv maxim, saying yes opens whatever situation you are in to more choices.
The role came with a social life, one of the most beguiling and intimidating things about the job. In my first month, practicing my new rule of saying yes, I went to the local pub with a large group after work. It was a Tuesday night, so saying yes to this was already stretching me—who does ANYTHING on a Tuesday night except watch a sensible amount of episodes of Nordic crime shows? By midnight, I’d said yes to more shots than I could count, briefly made out with someone on the street corner, and then woke up in the early hours of the morning in a small park fifteen minutes from my home.
I knew my scam would only work if I was able to mimic the lifestyle of my younger colleagues. So, I invented a rule to force me into a young mindset: I would simply say ‘yes’.
At the same time as all this was happening around the workplace, I was carrying out the same scam and its rules in other aspects of my life—meeting new people, dancing in clubs until the early hours of the morning. I was, for the first time ever, entirely outwardly and confidently queer, after spending many years inching out of the closet like a particularly slow and reluctant book in the Narnia series. I was working with queer people who I became fast friends with, I was going to gay events, dating widely. There’s a concept called ‘second adolescence’, where queer people experience all the things later in life that straight people usually get done by their teens. I was doing it all in my thirties. Saying yes in my queer second twenties has been so important to me because it banished fear and regret—two things that you internalise and expect to be a part of your life forever when you are in the closet.
I took every opportunity to rebuild and redefine who I was to the world. I was trialling a new me, and I’m so grateful that I did.
*
The reason Younger was able to maintain seven seasons (three good, four which didn’t age gracefully), is that trying to hold onto youth is like trying to hold onto a big handful of chaos, like attempting to keep a bunch of cloned dinosaurs cloistered on an island. Liza was continually thrown into madcap situation after madcap situation, attempting to cover up the lie, attempting to live her new reality. But where the show lost its way was when Liza got all the things she wanted—her job, a robust love life, friends and a social life. She outgrew her own scam. She’d grown up, and the necessity of the lie was no longer needed.
I took every opportunity to rebuild and redefine who I was to the world. I was trialling a new me, and I’m so grateful that I did.
My experiment only lasted a year; I realised that I didn’t need to hold onto the elusive energy of youth anymore, because like Liza, I had achieved all the things that I truly wanted.
I came out of my ‘younger’ year with a lot of things: horrific burnout, a crash course in writing, and, most of all, a group of friends and treasured experiences that I am grateful for every single day.
I also came out of this experiment with the tools to re-shape my life when necessary, to never feel trapped or limited by circumstances. There’s a lot of power in that. I’m still bemoaning the passage of time, especially the lost years of the pandemic, but I’m doing that as someone comfortable(ish) in their own age.
If there’s a lesson here, it’s that we have the power to be the person we want to be, to live the life we choose. Because it didn’t matter that Liza Miller and I convinced the people around us, it mattered that we managed to scam ourselves.
