:: Vanity of youth ::

When you're in your twenties, life is a lethal cocktail of hedonistic pleasures. You've just broken the chains of parental control. You're earning your own cash, you start making 'grown-up' decisions, your priorities are spun around libertine distractions, and the world is an enthralling playground of possibilities and options.

How else can we justify our wanton routines―and how else can we pacify our torpid need for material gratification? We buy. We eat. We drink. We want. All with the careless disregard of our twenty-something easy-living years.

We enjoy the freedom our monthly paychecks bring, but we falter at the responsibilities that follow. We proclaim to the world―in the way we dress, in the way we behave, and in the places we choose to throw our money at―that we no longer care about how our parents think, but at the end of another hard-drinking, swank-eating day, we slink back into our parents' house knowing that the pain of living with them is compensated by the money we save on rent. We moan because we don't get to travel the world. We consider ourselves poor when we can't afford that car or that bag or that spa-getaway. We're miserable because we're overeducated. The state of our hair or bodies matter more than the state of the world.

And I'm guilty. I'm young and I'm stupid. I'm chasing after the bubble of paltry perfection. I'm never contented; I'm constantly dissatisfied with my job, my family, my friends, my hair, my lack of lack.

I try to embrace this as the fleeting madness of my salad years―I try to believe that eventually I'll turn my whims into adult fancies. I try to wipe off the dissonance about the amount of money I spend to have my hair chemically coloured and straightened. I try to convince myself that I deserve that trip to Europe. I try to tell myself that it's all about balance―I work hard, I play hard, and I reward myself because we can't helped but to be punished by the little things in life.

But I feel small, because I'm not big enough to live with myself―my curls, my cubicle-existence and my consistent appetite for change.

***

My father will turn 55 tomorrow. I look into his eyes and see a defeated old man. What is your saving grace? And will my riotous youth ensure that I will never grow old the way you do? Because if it does, I have every reason to want that trip to Europe. To stop working so that I can write my book. To run away with the first man who brings that twinkle back into my eyes. Your regret scares me. And you know what? If living it up now means that I will never spiral down the way you did, I would.

Except I think of my sisters, and that streak of rebellion will remain what it is―a momentary paralysis of sense―and I will recover.