The 30 year old Intern

Forget Botox and 10 step skin care routines! This one shift could have the world treating you like your in your 20s again...

“How old would you say I am?” I asked a coworker for my internship in Brussels. It was just after a woman who looked like Barbara Windsor sitting in a kitchen, which evokes the Instagram page ‘ugly Irish houses’ asked me via a zoom interview for my leaving cert results.

“I’d say 24..” he replied, pretty confidently. He’s 25. Notably, he perceives himself as older than me. Needless to say, he was flummoxed when I told him I was turning 30 in just a few weeks. As did PR’s Peggy Mitchell when I told her I didn’t have my leaving cert results to hand as its been over ten years since I sat it. 

I know, I know, you’re like “alright love don’t brag.” Because yes, people being astounded by your age is famously complimentary for women. That common old movie trope comes to mind where a man flatters his love interest’s mom. “What? She’s your mother? Why, you two could be sisters.”

The truth is it's not my ethereal complexion that hides my true seniority. In fact, I’m as baffled by their misjudgments as they are at my real age. Each night I go to the mirror in my bathroom and notice more and more differences. The shape of my face has changed, my skin isn’t as tight, my once defined jawline is pretty much non-existent. The lines my friends eradicated with preventative Botox are no longer a sign of my worries but more like permanent fixtures, making me wonder if there is still time to jump on that bandwagon.

I look older because I am older and my bad habits like smoking everybody else’s cigarettes and filling glasses of water and leaving them to gather dust on my desk are definitely catching up to me. And yet.. everywhere I seem to go people constantly mistake me for, or treat me like I’m in university.

Why is that you ask? Well because really fucking recently I was.

People don’t treat me like I’m younger because of my girlishness or my cherub-like features or my natural glow. People mistake me for being younger because of where I am in life.

At 25, I made what I used to think was the best decision of my life, to go back to university and get an undergrad in European Studies, because I was interested in something for the first time ever and because I wanted to change my life. Don’t worry, I’ll save the bio for my memoir, but suffice to say that I’d waitressed, taught English and administrated done my fair share of traipsing around the place to see it was time to knuckle down and achieve something. At the time, as an actual bright eyed and bushy tailed 24-year-old, I was applauded, admired, and envied by peers and anyone of an older age bracket for going against the grain.

“You’re never too old.” They’d say. “You’ll be thirty one day with or without the degree so might as well do it.” Infuriatingly people would list off celebrities who took their time on the road to success: “you know Samuel L. Jackson didn’t start acting until his forties” and “J.K. Rowling didn’t publish Harry Potter until she was 32.” 

That's great for them and, indeed, all of that encouragement did help me soldier through exams and get good grades. Yet, it did not prepare me for how out of whack this decision would make my natural ageing process with my position in life. 

Since then, each decision I make, despite it feeling at the time like it’s the step that will realign me and bring me closer to the societal norm of a woman moving into her thirties seems to crumble beneath my feet. The stability these steps promise immediately give way once I entrust them with my full weight and I’m left plunging right back down to the bottom of the wrung. Resigned to starting over yet again. Each time my head is wearier and my body heavier - probably from my stagnating metabolism.

It's disheartening for many reasons. I feel intense shame for having to miss my friend's pivotal life events like weddings, hen parties and baby showers because my internship stipend doesn’t stretch that far. That shame is then nicely bolstered by people’s squeamishness around me and my position. A few months ago, I didn’t get a trainee position for being “overqualified,” but the look on their faces and subsequent commiseration email read more like “a bit too old.” I didn’t get the internship with Barbara Windsor’s PR company either, the distance from my leaving cert was too hard to swallow. Someone at an internship I did eventually get, told coworkers I was 27, as if subtracting those few years made the whole thing feel a bit more comfortable. Who could blame them? Its far easier to bully someone younger than you. It gets a bit shameful for everyone when your bullying someone close to your age or worse….older. But hey, those compliments keep on coming right? “30??...there’s no way… you seem so young!”

A girl I used to know makes Canva templates with inspirational quotes and posts them on her Instagram story about three times a week. For some reason they always centre around personal defiance of societal expectations. “Normalise travelling in your 30s, switching careers in your 40s, getting married in your 50s,” her post from last Tuesday reads.

Ironically, she has worked for the same company since she was 25. She is posting it from a house she just bought with her long-term partner. She is 32. I can imagine she is also treated as such. Not due to her ageing skin, or more womanly frame. In fact I’d go so far as to say she looks far better than me. She is treated her age because she has reached all the milestones and done everything the way society expected her to. I am treated like a 24-year-old because my accomplishments and position mirror that of someone that age. I hold my thumb on the screen to read it again and wonder whether she might be mocking me?

Everyone is still getting married in their early 30s, the six weddings I’ll be attending over the next 12 months are a testament to this. Maybe that’s why we need these groundbreaking calls to action popping up in our feeds. Naturally they make the most impact when circulated by someone who seems to only be prescribing it for others, her mortgage and career progression suggest she hasn’t exactly sipped her own Kool aid.

But look, it's not all doom and gloom. Who among us can say that on the eve of their 30^th birthday, a friend of their mother’s marveled at their youthly demeanour. “You look about 14!” She exclaimed. Of course, I smiled back at her – and it wasn’t wholly forced either. I’m actually quite relieved. Those graduate paychecks don’t stretch far enough for beauty treatments so it's nice to know that it works its magic in more ways than just beefing up the old CV. Come to think of it, that’s probably why the money is so shit - benefits are deducted.

If your jade roller isn’t quite doing the job and strangers and shop assistants are starting to refer to you as “the lady.” If you want to shop in Bershka and seem as though you wouldn’t be out of place doing a TikTok dance, then maybe that career change in your 30’s or 40’s might actually be for you. It just might be the fountain of youth that women have been searching for all these years. Though I’ll admit it's more invasive than Botox, I still think there’s a chance we’ll start seeing it on the price list of Therapie clinics any day now.

But if we’ve learned anything Hocus Pocus, Death becomes her, or Donatella Versace… just like all youth elixirs and experimental treatments, terms and conditions apply.