It started when I wasn’t 11. Every day after school, I would sit in bed, flanked by posters of intricately muscled anime men, and steer purple-haired kunoichis and knuckle-cracking assassins into battle in an Xbox game. The players I competed against online ranged from late-stage adolescents to full-term adults; I would sometimes overhear the older cohort negotiating dinnertime with their partners or shooing away children. I didn’t want to be another kid to them — I wanted their respect and needed their friendship. One day, I found a solution. “I’m 13,” I lied into my mic, pushing down the prepubescent pitch of my voice. And suddenly I was, at least to my distant combatants and internet pals. In the bargain, I unknowingly became a lifelong player in a different kind of game.
Now that I’m 32, I no longer feign being a teenager. But at parties, I do check a few years like I might a coat. It’s not that I need to misrepresent myself in a formal way, as I did when brandishing a fake ID throughout the first half of college. Instead, I make jokes to my friends and online — about awaking one morning from uneasy dreams to find that I have been transformed into a gigantic 27-year-old. Eventually, I made enough of these jokes that people I had known for half a decade would join in on the bit or, surprisingly often, even be tricked by it. There was no drastic benefit to being 27 versus 32. This arbitrary age felt freeing; adopting a fake one, whether up or down, unburdened my real one of any meaning. So I embraced relative youth.
Why, you might ask? What’s the difference between being 32 and 27? A few dozen months, a first gray hair, the casual agony of having slightly less life to live — or a dash of whimsy and an ounce of initiative? How about a sense of humor about Being and Time? And maybe a desire to transform fears about obsolescence and death into a low-stakes gimmick? What if I told you I’m actually 31?
How old do I sound to you, by the way? Be dishonest.
I could list here any number of reasons I have embraced 27 specifically: It teeters between the mid and late 20s. It’s a harbinger of the first cold flakes of 30, yet stands firm in its youthful charm. It’s a naïve age, a tragic age — think of the 27 Club — and an age suited to sweeping, insupportable generalizations and stupid self-mythologizing. It’s a good time, in other words. But I can remove the veil of mischief, too, to reveal the sad truth: that I am a gay man, enamored with other men’s flighty desire, and seek to distract myself from the prospect of eventually losing their attention as I age by transforming that process into a pointless joke. That, as a writer, I want to hold onto the belief that I might yet develop the routines and work ethic necessary to write something great before I die — not even the sense that I will produce a magnum opus, but that a future version of myself still could. I believe very strongly in the power of living in denial. But such reasons actually obscure another, deeper one: Lying about your age is fun, and essentially harmless. It reclaims a shameful dark art for the side of good-natured foolishness.
Were I more delusional or a day over 30, I would say that my fibbing is a sly, no-cost critique of our desire to freeze ourselves in place. We’re presented with an ever-growing arsenal of technologies from the beauty industry to stop time’s advancing. Many of them — laser regimens, Kris Jenner face lifts, fat removals and injections, experimental longevity medications and procedures — are cost prohibitive. It’s impossible to keep up with the changing faces of the rich and famous, but we are told to try. Lying, on the other hand — free, easy, old-fashioned — has a leathery, everyman appeal. It’s an anti-aging supplement for the wrinkling masses. It’s also reversible, reminding us of how unconvincing any one age ever is. If I ever find myself annoyed with the antics of true 27-year-olds, I can simply take a breath, become 29 and luxuriate in my maturity.
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