Not by much. Four years. Enough that nobody would look twice at the number on paper, enough that if anyone ever pulled my old resume against the one I submitted for this role, the math simply wouldn’t work, and there’d be no clever explanation for it. I did it anyway, and I’ve kept doing it for going on three years now.

I tell myself everyone in this industry does it after forty. I’ve heard enough stories to believe that’s at least partly true — women especially, in creative roles, watching the callbacks quietly dry up the same year they turn a certain age, no explanation given, none needed. So I shaved the years off before anyone could do the math for me. I picked a birth year that felt safe, memorized it, and made sure every account, every form, every casual “so when’s your birthday” conversation stayed consistent with the lie.

The strange part isn’t the lying. I expected that to feel heavier than it does. The strange part is how normal it’s become — how I don’t even flinch anymore when I write the wrong year on a form, how it’s just become one more fact about myself that isn’t true, filed away next to all the ones that are.

What I actually hold my breath over is HR audits. Every open enrollment period, every background check renewal, every time a new manager asks for updated documentation, I run through the same quiet calculation: is this the year it finally doesn’t line up. So far it always has. I don’t know what I’ll do the day it doesn’t — whether I’ll have a story ready, or whether four years of built-up lying will just collapse in one meeting, in front of someone who was born the same year I was pretending to be.