Flailing in the green room.

[Which We Want origami dress, Need Supply + Rachel Pally shrug + Seychelles booties + Citrine by the Stones tassel necklace]

If there’s one thing I envy about men, it’s the “man child” phenomenon that somehow makes not acting one’s age charming. More than charming, magnetic. Independence is mysterious, enviable, and immortal. And good looks just sort of get more chiseled… less difficult to pin down.

As a woman, failing to seamlessly and gracefully transition into new phases of life and appropriate hair lengths makes you look, well, desperate. It’s not charming. Too old to stay out all night? Get married, and make it look wonderful. Too old to hang with the twenty-somethings, but too young to retire? Have children, and make it look like paradise. Lower hemlines. Raise necklines. Juggle work and bills and neighbors and small talk. Delight your husband with your girlish figure. And make it look effortless.

I guess I was banking on being in the clear from this peril until the other night, when I felt totally foolish. The entire following day “act your age” kept ringing through my pounding headache.

I’m admittedly pretty puerile, and I’m also fluent in self-deprecation, but the show I put on when I somehow ended up in the green room after a concert last week—Washed Out, which was amazing—made me aware that I was (for one of the first, but definitely not the last times) the old hat in the room.

I’m definitely not edgy, rich, or skinny enough to pull off being the old hat. But perhaps sobriety would have been clutch.

I’d piggy-backed on my single, 9-years-younger-than-I-am friend’s “on-the-list” status (gah! to be 24 with an iPhone), got beyond the security guard, and loudly let myself in to the sort of dated, leather-clad green room upstairs at the concert hall—teetering on heels with a belligerent monologue about conference calls and cats pouring forth while I helped myself to Pellegrino, picked up, then put back down a banana, touched a pack of crackers, then helped myself to a Stella. It was like a one-woman open mic, me leading the drummer in a cacophonous rehearsal of how best to intonate the word “goddamnit” for maximum effect. “No, you gotta go harder on the middle syllable.”

In a second, I was aware that I felt annoying. Actually annoying. 33 will give you one edge: you know when it’s time to go.

With the Pellegrino tucked under my arm, I evacuated with practiced nonchalance and a parting joke, marching down the staircase I assumed was the one I’d come up. With a loud, metallic crash, I bellied up to a metal door, noisily breaking the silence of the quiet side street and slipping onto the sidewalk that was definitely not the interior of the theater.

It was a door which I immediately recognized to be the roped-off band entrance/exit door. I knew that door.

Relief was the first emotion. Victory the second. A vague awareness I was bidding farewell to a different part of my life, the third.

I lingered for a moment, walked along the parked vans, stepped over a generator, then leaned back against the side of a black bus. Temporarily romanced by my slithery exit from exclusivity, I stopped feeling sorry for myself.

Sometimes the door out—rather than the door in—is where the magic happens. But you have to be the one opening it for yourself.

-C.