Earlier this week, 25-year-old Anita Castillo arrived home for Christmas and within minutes, fully transformed back into her teenage self.
“I have my own apartment in the city and pay all my own bills with my own job consulting for Deloitte, but I completely regress within five minutes of walking through the front door,” says Castillo, “It’s like Cinderella when the clock strikes midnight, only I turn into an argumentative, Soffe-short wearing 15-year-old girl.”
Castillo’s mother, Gabriella, also couldn’t believe how rapidly her daughter lapsed back into adolescence.
“We started fighting as soon as she put her bags down in her childhood room, which doesn’t even look the same anymore! We’ve been using it to store craft supplies,” she says. “One minute I was casually chatting with a grown woman, the next minute I was screaming about curfew times. What happened?”
Her daughter admitted she started the fight.
“I’m only home for a week, but I chose to watch Buffy reruns in my old high school friend’s basement rather than stay for my mom’s holiday party,” says Castillo. “I know better than that at my age. But once I turned back into my teenage self, I just started making these pointlessly defiant choices instead of prioritizing time with my family, like an adult.”
Wow! What an incredible about-face in maturity!
Other members of the Castillo family also noticed the transformation, citing an unusual increase in Castillo’s desire to roughhouse and make poop jokes at the dinner table.
“I don’t understand why she’s behaving like this all of a sudden,” says father George Castillo. “She sounds so put-together when we talk on the phone, then bam! Not long after she actually arrives home, I’m yelling at her to get up before 9am so we can make an earlier church service, and she’s refusing to get dressed until I stop yelling, but I can’t stop yelling because her poor time management skills infuriate me. It was such a time-warp, I almost started nagging her about her college applications.”
“Now I’m stuck in the vortex of the familiar feeling that nothing I ever do is right,” says Castillo, now hiding in the garage as she takes a hit from the joint she managed to smuggle in her luggage. “At least I didn’t bring my boyfriend home, so I didn’t have to sit through yet another lecture about the dangers of premarital sex.”
After the holidays end and Castillo returns to her own apartment, she is expected to make a full transformation back into adulthood.
