1995 Was 30 Years Ago

I was 16 in 1995.

Lately I’ve been trying to understand something: a little more than how I got here, a little less than where did all the time go. More like: if I could do it all again, would I make the same choices.

To be clear: I’m not talking about going back and fixing things. More like, when you get to the end of a video game and you replay it from the main character’s point-of-view. Meaning they don’t have any special knowledge outside of the game. They don’t know how the first run went, and so you as the player don’t use any of that knowledge in the second run. But you make different decisions.

Maybe the first run was very you: compassionate, overly sensitive, small, minimally disruptive, agreeable, defaulting to others’ happiness over your own. Maybe the second run of the game, you force yourself to make decisions as if you were a different person. Not being mean or evil, exactly, but taking your own existence into account. Advocating for yourself, fairly but without capitulation. Putting your own oxygen mask on first, which means sometimes not taking the elderly woman’s side quest in that small village you know you’ll never return to again. Not because you’re mean, but because you only have so much you can give.

The second run through hurts you existentially.

Video games were supposed to be worlds where the choices we’re forced to make in real life don’t apply. Your character never gets tired - or if they do, you can sleep, because time doesn’t matter - never runs out of food, never seems to need water, never has to run to the toilet, unless it’s for comedic effect. You can spend an in-world lifetime doing the side quests and then continue with the main quest as if two minutes have gone by.

You reach the end of the second run-through and evaluate. Not in game terms, not in achievements, awards, plot points or percent completion. The you in the real world evaluates your experience of inhabiting different versions of yourself through these two playthroughs.

You hated the second run. It felt like everything that’s wrong with the real world. Nobody helps anybody, nobody has time. Nobody takes a deep breath and helps someone who can’t offer them anything in return. Then you look at your scores within the game itself. Your percentage completion is higher in the first run. It makes sense: you did more, explored more, achieved more than just the basic story arc.

Whichever way you evaluate it, the second run was terrible. Selfish, and even in that self-centeredness, you ultimately achieved less. Missed out on the side quests, didn’t rack up as many points. You wonder why anyone would play the game that way, when they’d miss out on so much of it.

I was 16 in 1995.

That was 30 years ago.

If you’d asked me before the age of 16 who or what I wanted to be, I’d have said an author, writing great works of famous fiction. Instead, I built a career in IT, because I liked computers and my parents said it would be be stable.

I never dated in high school or college, for a number of confusing reasons. I thought it was just because I was shy, but it turns out that I was queer and confused, and too worried about being unworthy of love, or somehow misrepresenting myself and being a disappointment to the other person. But I met someone at 25 and married her at 30, leaving one country for another in the process. Partly because I was in love and partly because I seemed like the kind of person she needed in her life.

It’s been a whirlwind since then. She passed away almost four years ago now and I’ve been trying to understand.

Understand who I am, how I got here, what happened along the way.

Not in a bad way, not with regret. Not talking about going back and fixing things. Just trying to understand.

The best way I can explain it to myself is that the last 30 years have been a side quest. I stopped in that village, I helped the townspeople. One task led to another and I forgot about the main quest.

I forgot there was a story in progress.

That story is mine. Not in a selfish way, not in an individualistic way. Just that as I live and breathe, so I live, and breathe. Somewhere in the middle of the last 30 years, I’d forgotten that part. I thought I was tired, drained, and unhappy because of circumstance. The this or that of life, the small things, the obvious things, the explainable things.

But I’ve realized I was that way because I’d abandoned myself without even noticing.

I’ve seen people talk about self-abandonment on social media, and they usually get it wrong. Or at least, they only touch on the surface level, the outward-facing parts.

“Buy yourself that fancy coffee! Eat avocadoes! Take up painting!” they say. Or they’ll drop the “find your purpose!” line without telling you what that means.

Your purpose is the main quest. Finding your purpose means recognizing if you’re doing the objectives or if you’re participating in a side quest.

The hardest part about life is that sometimes the most fulfilling things are the side quests.

Ensuring you live to breathe another day isn’t glamorous. Taking care of your mental health, your physical health, your spiritual health, these things often feel selfish, boring, or unnecessary. I breathe therefore I am, that’s good enough, right? I should be able to just, you know, live and enjoy myself and everything will be fine. Right?

I was 16 in 1995.

Sixteen year old me is impressed with everything we’ve achieved. He (as he was back then) is impressed with my computer setup. He’s also confused by a lot of things.

Me, the person writing this in 2025 is also confused. “He” feels so strange to type when referencing my younger self. He understands that and is happy that we’ve found our collective expression. As much as he always felt soft and out of place, as much as he recognizes who I’ve become, he will always be himself in these reflections. I think it’s important to me as much as it is to him, because we can’t understand the decisions we made back then when viewed through my lens.

What if I had figured out my queerness as a teenager?

I don’t know.

If the conversation around gender had been back then what it is today, I might have figured it out sooner, probably would have wanted to transition, even.

What if I had? Would life be better?

I don’t know. That’s not a second playthrough. That’s restarting the game as a completely different character. It’s not playing the same game with different morals, different judgements, different valuations. It’s fundamentally adopting a character that I didn’t choose the first time through. One that didn’t resonate with me when I picked up the game, but one that I’d lean towards after all of those experiences. If I chose to play the game again as that different character, it wouldn’t be fair to also make different decisions. I’d have to do another first playthrough, making the same compassionate, overly sensitive, small, minimally disruptive, agreeable decisions. The outcomes, in the game world at least, would likely be the same. Some NPCs might have different dialog, some options might not be available or different ones would show, but it would be fundamentally the same.

Because it’s not about who I was, it’s about how I was.

It’s about how I showed up, the decisions I made, the side quests I chose to go on. How I treated other people, how I treated myself.

Of course, in the real world, this would be vastly different.

How I treated myself would have been vastly different, for a start.

I always felt a creeping sense of misalignment. Adults chalked it up to teenage angst, the stress of moving often, transient things that would mend in time.

I always knew I was different.

Not in that way.

Well, yes, absolutely in that way, actually.

But not in that way.

I knew I was different, but not in the Buffy way. Not in the Spiderman way. Not in the way where those differences were heroic or marketable. Not in the way where those differences made me something more than anybody else. Not in the way where those differences would one day grow into something that would save the world or save the ones I loved.

Just different.

Different in that way where I was deeply introspective but never fully related to myself. Where I could see into myself only darkly, to borrow a phrase from Philip K. Dick.

To see into myself with the sort of clarity that cuts most people. But for me, only allowed me to see the murk. To know it was there but not see into it. The more I tried to look the harder it was to understand. Like those “magic eye” posters that were all the rage in the ‘90s. Stare too hard into them with ever more furrowed brow and you’d see static. White noise. Confusion. Give up, toss the book away, and you’d see something accidentally, maddeningly out the corner of your eye. Maybe once or twice you’d behold the entire image, but then you’d breathe and shift and it would vanish, leaving only its impression behind.

I was 16 in 1995.

Thirty years later I understand all of that now.

And I understand something else.

Hindsight doesn’t see into the future, yet you can only understand how to get there by knowing where you’ve come from.

It’s not about predicting the future, it’s not about doing the right thing.

It’s only about recognizing the present moment. Our experience of it. That time is only linear because our brains can’t process everything at once.

I finally have the answers that 16 year old me was desperate to uncover, and he doesn’t want them. Not because he’s stubborn, not because he doesn’t listen to authority, not because I’m old and uncool. He doesn’t want them because he hasn’t figured them out.

I tell him it could save him thirty years of wasting his life. That he could skip ahead, know who he is, what he wants, maybe even how to achieve it, or at least, how not to. Or how the things he’s going to do won’t achieve the things he thinks he wants to achieve. How he doesn’t even know what he wants, how miserable he’ll be at so many points in his life.

He stops me.

“Is it all that bad, then?”

“Well, no. There’s that time when…”

He stops me again.

“I’m sure it’ll be great, then.”

“But you’ll waste 30 years! It’s not that great!”

“Really?”

“Yes!”

“Okay then. What would you like me to do?”

I close my eyes and think, hard. What if he’s really listening to me this time? What if this is my one opportunity to really get through to him. What do I say? Out of all of the ruminations of the last 30 years, what is the one thing I would change if I could. Not the most painful thing I wish I could have avoided, or the thing I didn’t do that’s haunted my life. Or all the silly ways I doubted myself, talked myself down. The people I didn’t engage with. The hopes and dreams I had, the ones I ignored to help or please other people. Beyond all of that, what’s the one thing that would make the biggest difference? Is it our queerness? That we’re allowed to take up space? That we should try harder to pursue that writing thing? That we shouldn’t get married when the opportunity arises, or we should ask that one girl out when we didn’t?

I’m aware that I’ve asked myself these questions countless times. I’m aware that he’s waiting. I open my eyes.

“Well?”

“Just. Just get us here safely, okay.”

He looks confused for moment.

“Didn’t I do that already?”

I was 16 in 1995.