Appearances can deceive

The longer I interact with my officemates, the more I learn about them and their personal lives.

Well, maybe that’s not something that should be considered out of the ordinary. However, I was in for a surprise when I learned some of them were not as I had assumed.

It was only yesterday that I learned that Mark, our resident guitarist and ladies’ man, took a vacation leave last week on his birthday. It turns out it was a week-long leave because he got married to his longtime sweetheart and had their honeymoon in that time. And he’s less than a year older than I am.

Over lunch this afternoon, I spotted a picture of a young girl inside my team lead Mylou’s wallet. I had innocently asked if it was her in her younger days. She replied that it was her nine-year-old daughter. I was frankly very surprised—I never heard a peep from her about having a daughter of her own before this. Mylou is just three years older than I am.

All the time I was practicing jamming along with Mark and our other bandmates for the company summer outing, playing badminton and joking around with Mylou, for the life of me, I had never ever expected them to have such serious commitments.
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This leads me to wonder. I’m now twenty-three. I’ve had just one serious relationship. By and large, I’m still an egocentric entity existing in the world of anime, fast cars and giant robots. I tend to run away from problems or avoid them altogether. I don’t have much of a fortune I can call my own, nor do I have anything much to go on at the moment since I just got my first salary.

My folks were right: I’ve had too sheltered an upbringing and because of that my street smarts are close to nil. No matter how independent I think I am, the fact of the matter is I’m still chained to this invisible umbilical cord, and I’m probably too scared to cut it off and grow my own navel and mark my maturity.

How ready am I to face the world?

How ready am I to meet its challenges and disappointments, yet continue to grin and bear it?

How ready am I to commit to something as serious and irrevocable as marriage?

How ready am I to even think of having kids of my own?

The fact of the matter is, I am immature and everyone knows it—it’s written all over my face. I still haven’t grown up...at least not in the way the world expects me to have grown up, given my age. It’s a crappy feeling, me always thinking that I was better than everyone else...when actually, everyone else saw something a lot more important to surviving life in the long run. All the while, I just kept on missing the whole fucking point and continued indulging myself in my delusions of grandeur.

An old teacher friend of mine in high school once wrote me that she’d remember me as the guy who was always in a hurry to grow up. (Incidentally, she’s been married for a few years now.)

Hmmm.

I wonder what the fuck happened to me along the way.