somebody asked whether 20-year-old you would be impressed or disappointed by you today. i gave it some thought, which was my first mistake.
20-year-old me had more friends. probably more fun. lived in a city i liked better. he had fairly high expectations of a future somewhere gay-friendly, with a social life that did not require quite so much deliberate effort.
so, sure. show him the current situation and he’d probably have some complaints.
but why the fuck would i listen to that 20-year-old dickhead?
https://embed.bsky.app/static/embed.js20 y/o me had way more friends and probably more fun and lived in a better city and had pretty high expectations of a future in a gay-friendly city, so he'd probably be mad at me, but, then again, why the fuck would i listen to that 20 year old dickhead?
— schweg, (@schwegler.lol) 2026-09-17T19:43:56.389Z
i say that with affection. i was him. i remember enough of what he wanted to know that it wasn’t stupid. wanting friends, belonging, interesting work, and a place where being gay feels ordinary is a pretty reasonable set of requests. i haven’t stopped wanting those things.
what i object to is giving him the final say about how well i’ve done. he was making a prediction. he wasn’t agreeing to live through everything that happened next and then submit a report.
he did not have the full itinerary
when i started listing what 2009 me hadn’t experienced yet, the list got long quickly. friendships falling apart. the company behind a dream job shutting down. moving back to the hometown we’d left when i was ten. eventually ending up in Alabama. becoming my mother’s caregiver. losing her. the pandemic.
i’ve already written some of that history in “My Lost Decade.” i don’t need to repeat the whole thing here. but i do need it to count when i’m being asked to compare the life i imagined with the one i have.
there’s a remarkable amount of missing information in “would younger you be proud?” younger me hadn’t tried to hold his life together under those circumstances. he hadn’t even heard of most of the circumstances. he had a lot of opinions, of course. that part came installed.
if i asked an actual 20-year-old to assess my life, i’d probably explain what had happened before taking his disappointment personally. apparently, when the 20-year-old is me, i’m supposed to skip that step and accept the review.
i can miss that life without owing it an apology
the comparison is tempting because some of what i miss is real. i don’t want to pretend that every difficult thing improved me or that every turn was secretly taking me somewhere better. sometimes something good ended. sometimes i made a bad choice. sometimes the available choices were all pretty shitty.
i can miss the friends, the city, and the feeling that there was plenty of time without concluding that my current life is evidence against me.
i also don’t have to turn surviving into an inspirational job. there doesn’t need to be a lesson attached to everything i lost. i would happily have learned several of those lessons in a less thorough manner.
what i want is a fairer comparison. the person i was at twenty could imagine the future, but he couldn’t know what living it would cost or what would become important along the way. i know more now. not everything, obviously. enough to have earned a vote.
i wrote recently about never quite feeling like a finished adult. this is a different problem: treating an unfinished younger person’s expectations as if they were binding instructions.
some of those expectations are still useful. i’d like more connection. i’d like more fun. i can take those wishes seriously today without first agreeing that i’ve let somebody down.
so yes, 20-year-old me can tell me what he misses. i might agree with quite a lot of it.
then he can listen for a while. he has seventeen years to catch up on.
Featured image: Tichnor Brothers Collection / Boston Public Library / source. Public domain