Age is Just a Number

By Sam Gumprecht

As a teenage girl I carry a lot of things around with me. I carry the weight of my school bag filled to the brim with my books. I carry the fabric of my carefully picked out outfit. I carry the thin layer of mascara on my eyelashes, just enough to make my eyes look more defined. I carry a ball of stress wound up tight from my packed weekly schedule. I carry bags under my eyes from getting used to the early mornings of a school sleep schedule again. I carry a smile on my face as  I see my friends encircled around me at the lunch table. But if you stripped all of those things away I would still be carrying something. I would still be holding the secret little game of my age.

I am a junior in highschool, looking at colleges, preparing for a life out on my own and hitting major milestones, yet I am only sixteen years old, seemingly too young to be at this stage in my life. However, there is a simple explanation to this: when I was in second grade I skipped into the third about halfway through the year.

Whenever I introduce myself at the beginning of the school year, I refrain from saying my age and simply tell people where I am from and what I like to do. I play a little game with myself and see how long I can make it into the year until people figure out my real age. Then when it comes time to reveal my big secret I do a sort of social test to see how people react. When people find out I have skipped a grade and how old I am, it’s usually followed by one main response and a few varied comments:

The topic of age will come up eventually and someone politely asks…

“How old are you?” And they expect me to a say a number close to theirs, like seventeen or eighteen.

As I respond with, “Sixteen” my cheeks blush before I even hear their response. I think in my head, “what is it gonna be this time, shocked or unphased?”

“Wow, oh my goodness you are so young!” is the typical response with a tone of surprise. This is followed by multiple questions trying to determine how I am so young, playing detective.

I typically brush it off by laughing or just cutting right to the chase and explaining how I skipped a grade.  I feel an instant shift in how people treat me from when they hear the number leave my mouth. Though sometimes I find good people who don’t let the number change how they treat me.

Fast forward a few years from my little third grader self. I have felt the weight of my age more and more as I near adulthood and the years get piled on. When I was younger I always learned to see the brighter side: I was in a more challenging curriculum, I would get to start college at an earlier age, and I was in a more mature atmosphere. But as milestones arrive for my peers, my age seems to hinder me a bit more than it used to. As people are out driving around, I’m waiting at home for my ride. More people tend to take in my age now as a contender in my self worth, as if age determines what type of person I am. I have learned to roll with people’s judgement on my value being based on a simple number. I know that my age doesn’t determine how mature I am; I know that it doesn’t determine my intelligence, and it’s not something I should fear. This has then transferred over to how I treat others: I do not judge simply on how old they are. I have come to learn that age is just a number and a weight I carry but should not care about.