I hope that you don’t mind that I enjoy your writing, despite my being some 50 years further down the road than you. When I was in my 20s, I didn’t find adulting particularly painful — not nearly as painful as I’d found childing or teening. That may have been because in those days there was a much broader gap. Teens today are so much closer to being adults than we were that when you do close the gap, you wonder why things aren’t better than you thought they might be. But as I rapidly close in on what remains to me of adulthood, I increasingly understand the prices that I’ve paid for what I’ve received, and the opportunity costs, as the economists would say, of my life choices.

Would I have done things differently? Possibly. But we’re never given the chance to find out. Might there have been something that I had to do, from within myself? That wasn’t a question I could ever have posed, given the worlds that gripped me.

It’s not that I envy you, as such. I could not be in my 20s again, facing what you face. It’s bad enough facing what I do face. But I do admire your ability to ask the questions that I never asked, besotted as I was with having survived my youth. It’s the questioning that matters, not the answering. I know that now, now that there isn’t enough time left for the answers to make any difference.