Youth, youth, youth.  That’s all I ever hear about these days with this presidential election going on.  So you can imagine my apprehension when I turned 30 years old last week. Eeek!  It wasn’t so much the comments:  “oh my gosh, you don’t look a day over 21!”  or “you can’t be 30, you look so young!” And the best one yet, from some of my student mentees in Trenton, New Jersey:  “Ms. Sia, you’re older than my Mama…we didn’t know you were that old!”

     Yes, I am that old.  No longer would I be able to say that I was a young, hip, twenty-something.   Gone were the glory days of my twenties where I could stay up all night partying or studying, sleep 2 hours, get up and get to work on time and then come back home and do the same thing all over again the next day, without missing a beat.  Towards the later years in my twenties, I noticed that stunts like that started costing me and took me a little bit longer to recuperate.  Playing catch up was no joke!  I also noticed that I started pondering life choices with a lot more thought than before.  What had I done in life?  Was I happy where I was?  Had I hit my short and long term goal benchmarks?  Was I on my way to bigger and better things?   So many questions!  The things I used to brush off and say I’d worry about later, were suddenly staring me right in the face.  What to do but confront them?   One could say that this was one of the biggest differences between twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings.   Yet and still, this wasn’t my biggest concern. I was worried about being able to still relate to 20-somethings, the group that I was a part of for so long.

     In my mind, I could still relate.    But what about those in our society that didn’t think I could? In most studies, the youth demographic is described as 17-29 or under age 30. But wait a minute…aren’t my concerns still the same as the youth?  Healthcare.  Home Ownership.   Finances.  The Environment.  The cost of Higher Education.  HIV/AIDS.   The Genocide in Darfur.  Discrimination.  The War in Iraq.  My list goes on and on and is probably a little longer now that I’m a little older (smile).   The things that concern me are for the most part considered “youth issues” or everyone’s issues, as described in Michael Connery’s blog at Talking Points Memo. 

     The newest study by CBS/MTV polled voters ages 18-29 and identified that one of the biggest concerns facing youth voters right now is the state of the economy.  Really?  Me too!  I worry about how to make ends meet and how to stretch my last dollar every day.  I worry about how I’m going to fill up my gas tank and I worry about if I’m saving enough money in these tough economic times.  It seems to me, that you don’t have to be in that exact age demographic to commiserate.  

      I would love to repeat the cliché that age is just a number but some days it never quite feels that way.  Around election time, it always seems that we’re put into some kind of category, label or box to be poked, prodded and dissected for studies, with little to no regard for our own personal descriptions.  For me, right now, I still feel the “youthiness” of my 20s.  So I’m a little bit older, a little bit wiser.  I’ve lived a through a whole other decade and had a lot of time to perfect it.  The pressure is on to step it up in my 30s but for now, I’ll do what works for me just like I did when I was a young, concerned 20-something.