Aging & Wisdom Quote by Margaret Atwood

Atwood nails the private humiliation of “adulthood” as a costume party you didn’t realize had rules. The line moves like a confession but lands like a quiet indictment: the belief isn’t that she’s uniquely immature, it’s that the category “adult” is a performance everyone else has mastered. “Merely in disguise” makes the self both observer and imposter, suggesting that competence is often just well-tailored camouflage.

The intent is slyly destabilizing. Atwood isn’t chasing sentiment; she’s puncturing the cultural myth that there’s a clear border where you cross over and become finished. The subtext is institutional: work, marriage, parenthood, and social authority reward people who act certain, who speak fluent assurance. If you don’t feel the click of internal certainty, you assume you missed the memo. That’s the psychological engine of impostor syndrome before the term was common currency, rendered with Atwood’s signature coolness.

Why it works is the pronoun math. “Everyone else my age” is a chorus of imagined experts; “I” is singular, exposed. The belief is irrational on its face, yet instantly recognizable because it mirrors how we calibrate ourselves: not by a stable inner yardstick, but against the apparent ease of others. Coming from a novelist who has spent decades mapping power, gender, and social scripts, the line also hints at who gets to look “adult” and who’s forced into perpetual audition. Adulthood, in Atwood’s telling, is less a milestone than a mask that only seems seamless from a distance.