My signifiers do not match my signifieds

I'm at an odd time in my life, and have been for a few years, where I don't know what to call myself. Technically I'm an adult. I have been for a good five years now. I'm still in school, though, and even though it is graduate school and I'm working toward a master's degree, it doesn't seem as though anything has significantly changed for me. Up until recently I've been easily classified as a girl, and I'm fine with that. In the past few years, however, people, particularly professors, have used the word "woman" when discussing me or other females of my age. This sounds incredibly strange to me. I'm not a woman; I'm a girl . . . I've always been a girl. Somehow things changed when I wasn't paying attention.

It is no better with males, by the way. When I was dating one recently, I couldn't refer to him as a boy for that would have given me only strange looks and hairy eyeballs. Of course, I couldn't call him a man either. Men are something like thirty-five years old, right? So now what? I was reduced to referring to him "this guy I'm seeing." Hmm . . . that's just no good.

There really needs to be words for people in this awkward time of life. Yes, yes, there is always the option of throwing "young" in front of man or woman, but that is not entirely satisfactory either. Ah, what do we do when our language fails us?