A Matter of 10 Years

It occurs to me how much my life would have been affected if I were either 10 years older or 10 years younger. It doesn’t really seem like much – Shoryl is 8 years older than I am, after all, and we only encounter teasing examples of an understanding gap. I squeal in glee over a song on the radio that I remember hearing in high school, and she remarks that she remembers that song from a job she worked. She was getting divorced before I graduated from high school. She recently saw a picture with a barely-waist high me in a cute dress – taken the year she graduated from high school. But really, it’s not a terribly large gap.

But let’s say that I was 10 years older than I am. I would have graduated high school in 1985. I would have been old enough to remember Reagan as more than just a distantly seen figure of my childhood. AIDS would have been a new and terrifying new force in the world. Amusingly, New Coke would have been released the day before my 18th birthday, probably leading me to drink Diet soda even earlier. The Challenger disaster would happen one year later, and it would probably shape more of my life than the memories of a nine-year-old. I would have been “in the closet,” most likely, and there’s a chance that I may have been part of the “bar scene” of the queer lifestyle. If I were entering the workforce immediately, it would be the beginning of pc-tech oriented jobs. It would have been an exciting time to begin working on a career – or even a less painful time to go completely off the deep end and endure an identity crisis for 10 years (which is what the non-alternative universe me was doing. Oy.)

10 years younger, and my entire world would have changed. I would now be only 22 years old, just starting out. The end of my adolescence would have been shaped by a world that was marked by being able to just recite a date as a marker of national terror. I would be trying to enter the workforce at one of the most difficult times in (my) recent history. Would I still be in school, continuing on to graduate work after deciding that getting a job wasn’t the best thing to do right now? This last election would have been my first – how exciting would that be? I wouldn’t really understand a world without cell phones or internet. Same-sex marriage would have been legalized in Canada the year I graduated, and I would have been just figuring out the whole queer thing as various states here try to figure out what to do about it. I would, almost certainly, NOT have ended up working in a bank as an accountant. It would be intriguing, I think, to go from a twenty-something to a thirty-something in the coming decade.

And, the most important thing of course, is that I would be too young for Shoryl, which would be the real shame.

Consecutive days of writing: 002
Word count since 4/30/09: 1105