Aha. I think I figured it out. I have been fretting about this for awhile, how I am contradictory in what age I identify as. Am I younger? Am I older?¹ Can I be both? How? And what a cop-out, to say "I am both young and old." No pop-mystic sayings for me, buddy!

Here it is: I have two identifications; an absolute and a relative. The absolute identification is that I identify with a peer group that is born around 1968-1970. Thus I identify with a peer group that is older than me by about three to five years. The relative identification is that I also identify with being the youngest one in my peer group by about three to five years.

For most of my life, these two self-identifications have worked out to be one and the same. No, "worked out" is not the right phrase. More like the earlier circumstances of my life created these two self-identifications. Went to college at fifteen, everyone around me was older, but it felt normal it felt right because, well, it just was. That's how I lived, the young brat among my friends.

And then I go to law school after grad school and everything goes askew. My usual self-identifications did not work, because everyone actually *was* chronologically younger than me. So I lost my absolute self-identification and felt detached from my classmates. At the same time, goddamn it, I wasn't going to lose both self-identifications, so I started relatively identifying as being of an even younger age (i.e., three to five years younger than the people I was around, who were already around two years younger than me.)

And there ya go. I expect it'll all settle once I'm working at a steady job and all that, when the juxtaposition of different ages averages out any age-group identity.

I suppose I could have said this all quicker by "I am both young and old." But it will soon be irrelevant, because differences of five years gets smaller and smaller as we age.