Chronology by Margaret Atwood

When reading the poem Chronology by Margaret Atwood I was really lost in the text. I had recently seen the movie The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and well I was looking into the poem the movie’s plot really hit me. This poem is like the movie in that it is about a man getting younger as he gets older.
I believe this poem uses the idea of a person becoming younger as they get older is because the poem starts off by stating in first person how “I was born senile and gigantic”. However, the word senile is more often used with elderly people. The main character then goes on to tell us that “by 20” they finally discover that they have been “living backwards”. They then mention how the “lines on [their] features” were “slowly expunged”. When one gets older they tend to grow “lines on [their] features” they do not expunge them.
The narrator in the poem does not identify their gender. They never state clearly if they are a boy or girl. At first with lines 8-10 you believe that the narrator is a young boy when they mention “comicbooks” and that they were “bored with horror”. However in the next four lines they mention “red lipstick”.
In the end this poem is a very complicated one that would be really interesting to look at more deeply.