I spent all my life up until the end of my 20s feeling like I was older than my peers.
As a child I often felt like the childish games I played with my friends were more of a role-play I engaged them in than something born naturally in me. This probably also had a lot to do with the fact I could not relate to what little girls were supposed to relate to, the games of house or playing with dolls in anticipation of becoming a wife and mother in adulthood.
But it was more than that, there was the distinct feeling of not only being different but also older. At 12 I began to have existential depression because I couldn't figure out what I was meant to do. During any kind of carefree entertainment, there often came a moment in which I became detached and observed others as if they were only a part of a scene in a movie I was watching. In some way I felt like an imposter, someone merely pretending to be there and then, in the moment with them. I felt old. But not in the sense that I had more important and mature things to do. Old like something timeless, if that makes any sense. Like someone for whom the specific stages, rituals and milestones that define change and growth within a human lifespan made no sense. I felt more oneness with rocks, mountains and streams than with human beings.
In my later adolescence I ended up in a classroom with people two years older than me, and graduated at 15 (essentially because my traveling exploited a loophole in my education). I spent the end of high school being consistently amazed and depressed by the fact that I still felt so much older than the older people who surrounded me. I still could not relate to their concerns or ideas of fun, I couldn't focus on their conversation. I continued to find refuge in my own mind and lived very evidently inside my own head.
My twenties would have been a continuation of that if I hadn't ended up associating with people a lot older than me, and with these people I felt like I had finally found my peers. But now that I'm in my 30s, I feel like something strange is happening to me. I've begun to feel progressively younger. To the point where now, I look at people my age, and they seem to sound, act and look older than me. What's going on? Did I just miss the boat of adulthood while being busy doing something else? Did my refusal to comply with the rituals of maturity leave me lagging behind, in a sense? Why does everyone suddenly seem so old when they used to be so young? Why do I feel young when I spent so many years feeling old?
Is this... an INTP thing?
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Originally Posted by Madrigal
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