Letter two: What picking up older men in the subway at thirteen, taught me about being an adult
Dear Past-Michael,
Do you feel like an adult? It’s funny that the diary entries don’t provide many clues. You use the word adult exactly once in the 22,279 words of your diary, in a context that doesn’t give any clues.
I know that you look adult. When people guess that you’re 26 when you’re really 20, you feign jokingly taking offense when you in fact secretly enjoy it. You have already gotten your first gray hairs. I remember the anxiety you feel every time someone points it out. Don’t worry, that silver fox thing you started is working particularly well for me right now. You have been called precocious to your face more than once growing up, and I know you’d agree with me that you indeed acted precociously in many situations as a kid. I think that precociousness became a self-playing piano of sorts, powered by you looking older than your were, which you’ve done ever since puberty. It hit you early and went by pretty fast. At twelve your voice had already deepened, you were the among the first in your class to get pubes, and at thirteen you were regularly taken for sixteen or seventeen. You weren’t trying to act older, you simply acted like you. There was nothing contrived in it. And since you looked like it, and oftentimes effortlessly acted like it, people assumed your age and treated you accordingly. It led to you feeling like a young adult when your biological age was in the tweens.
The first time you became aware of your incognisance around your age was at thirteen. In eight grade, you had a two week internship period, in order to experience ‘a real job’. The school would provide the places of internship, but you wanted something more fun and adventurous so you asked if you could get your own. You could, and you did; you were the envy of many a kid in school when you landed an internship at the Swedish version of Hershey’s: Marabou’s factory in Sundbyberg. Speaking of how everything has a price: this seemingly awesome internship required you wake up at five in the morning to make the hour-long subway ride in time for the morning shift. After two days of stuffing your face, you didn’t want to eat, smell or see any more chocolate for weeks, and you still had eight more days. Eight more days of early mornings and monotonous tasks like sifting through the individually wrapped Daim candies to catch those the machine hadn’t wrapped correctly. It was too high a price for the amount of chocolate you ate, but you did get quite the experience out of it:
One of those early mornings on the blue line towards Sundbyberg, you sat across a guy you thought were hot. I have a vague memory of him looking like a young Bryan Adams meets Jon Bon Jovi. Almost all of your “hot guy” concepts at that age came from MTV, and I guess the mind uses whatever concepts it has at hand to explain things and store memories. You had not done anything with a guy yet, but at that point you knew you wanted to. It must have been that adolescent horniness that made you so bold as to pick up that he was interested in you. Not only did you pick it up, you also picked him up. As both of you got off the subway together with the legion of morning commuters, you pretended to tie your shoe to let the area clear a little. He struck up a conversation, and while neither you or I remember anything of it, I do remember that you got his phone number.
That weekend, you nervously called him from a payphone at the central station. I can’t remember the awkward conversation, but you ended up taking the subway a couple stops to his apartment. Precocious, indeed. Incautious too.
I can hear you say “See, I was irresponsible sometimes!” at this point. You have a hard time shaking off anything that can be construed as criticism. My remarks that you never were irresponsible — without judging it as good or bad, merely looking at the cost and reward — would be heard by you as “You weren’t perfect then and you aren’t now”. I know because I still deal with that. You are still on a quest for perfection, a quest that you believe will give you the thing you want most of all: to be loved. Surely you will be loved if you’re perfect? You won’t be aware of this disillusion until you’ve lost it. Which you will, even if it takes time. The starting point is a few years away, when a good friend says “we can only admire strengths, it’s the weaknesses we love”.
But at this point, this small perceived criticism will gnaw at your self-worth a little, and as soon as you make the connection that incautious is irresponsible, you will point it out. But in that hasty eagerness to prove that you’re more perfect than some people think, you would miss the nuance: while incautious and irresponsible overlap to some degree for most people, they do not for you. You see, for something to be irresponsible to you, it must entail a likely and unnecessary risk that isn’t worth the reward. But already at thirteen, going on sixteen or seventeen, you were thinking of yourself as pretty much an adult. All the horror movies and stories were about children and women getting in trouble, and you were neither. You thought yourself capable of dealing with any possible situation, and so you were never incautious in your world, only precocious.
I vaguely remember his apartment. You saw the hall and one room, but it must have been a studio with a separate kitchen, because his bed was in the living room. He said he had a boyfriend who was out of town. You didn’t say much. You were so nervous and eager for something to happen, with only a vague idea of what, but you didn’t dare to make the first move and hoped that he would. You ended up small-talking in front of MTV with some space between you on the couch. It felt like you had been there for a long time when he casually asked “How old are you?”, but it’s such a basic question to break the ice that it can’t have been more than fifteen minutes. You, nervous and oblivious, didn’t think and answered “Thirteen”. The look on his face revealed that you had said something wrong, before you understood why it was wrong. He told you: “Shit, I thought you were sixteen. I can’t believe you’re so young. You should go.” As you said goodbye, there was a moment of hesitation in his eyes, as if he was about to change his mind. He didn’t, and you cursed yourself for letting your insecurity and fear get in the way of your first sexual adventure. But if you think about it, the fantasies for the spank-bank from that encounter were probably far better than the actual thing would have been.
At thirteen, that’s also when the compartmentalizing began. The double-life. In one life, you were Przemysław Kazarnowicz, straight A (mostly) student at a mediocre junior high. You had a good boy reputation, you followed all the rules, and you… helped your neighbour lady with her dog. The other life, the Nameless Fag, was lived in total secrecy, unknown to anyone except for the boys and men you met for no string attached hook-ups. You met them through ads in Gula Tidningen, a Craigslist in paper format of sorts. You cruised them on the subway. Looking back, I’m surprised at how excellent you were at spotting guys who were open to cruising on the subway, and even more surprised at your straightforwardness in cruising them. It was an exciting hunt, big risk and big reward, but you were good at it and you loved it. I think the pressure played in; the pressure of being the good (but weird) honors student, the responsible son, the big brother, and all those feelings you’d already started bottling up. This was a way to relieve some of that pressure, and oh, what a delightful way. The excitement of the hunt, the orgasmic reward, the bottomless pit of shame that was the transition from Nameless Fag to Przemysław. I remember that you even had a story ready in case you got AIDS: you’d say that you had run up the stairs in your apartment building, tripped and cut your hand on a syringe. In that not-a-boy-not-yet-a-man head of yours, you had picked up that you could get HIV from drugs and put two and two together to a plausible story. Or so you thought.
I may as well address the name too, as I know you still haven’t dealt with it.
The fact that Michael, the name you use and the name I still go by, is taken is something you don’t like to talk about. Your given name is Przemysław, which you kept as a middle name when you took Michael at fifteen. I think that this is a bit of a touchy subject to you because you are unsure of the reasons, and when anyone asks you feel stupid. Being given a question you should know the answer to, but don’t, always makes you feel inadequate and stupid. You could always answer I just felt like it, but that would have been irrational. An irrational answer was even worse than the wrong answer. You don’t know the reasons because you’ve either squashed the underlying emotions, or flushed them down the angry sewer. Today, I can tell you a few, if not all, of them:
One is identity. You felt like the name designated you an identity as Polish but your cultural identity was Swedish at fifteen. The more other identities started to change and had to be questioned, the more you needed one identity that was stable. You could never be Polish because you didn’t live there, so you chose to be Swedish. I know this resonates with you, and eases a little of the shame you feel around this. I know, because I remember when it happened. It does not ease all of it, because you’re worried that people will see it as rejecting being Polish out of shame. Worried that people will see you as a traitor that tries to blend in with the majority. Your identity belonging to a group has to be confirmed — or at least not denied by — members of that group. That first name, Przemysław, unfailingly led to that question that implied you aren’t Swedish: “Where are you from?” To be honest, I’m often still confused when people ask me that question. Are they asking because they’ve seen my last name, which obviously isn’t Swedish? Do they want to know where I was born, or where I grew up? Are they asking about my national identity or my cultural? Today, I simply deal with it by asking “Do you mean where I was born, where I grew up or what I feel like?”
Another reason, connected to identity, is language. You learned Swedish very fast upon arriving. The method the school used was to put all six or seven kids that didn’t speak Swedish in the same class. None of the kids spoke the same language, and the few Swedish words the lot of you knew were the first stepping stones to to learn Swedish together. I think it took three or four months before you were ready to join your regular class, where you could skip math for a while (thank you Polish school with algebra in first class). That gave you even more time for reading and learning Swedish. Since mom’s new husband didn’t speak Polish, you mostly spoke Swedish at home. You could get a seemingly infinite number of books in Swedish at the library (and how you loved books!). Add to this an intuitive understanding that in order to be Swedish, you had to speak and understand Swedish like a Swede. The price of learning Swedish was forgetting most of your Polish, but you can’t yet summarize it so. You have to tell the whole story when someone asks “Do you speak Polish?” — you don’t want them to think that you don’t know Polish because you’re ashamed of it. Taking a Swedish sounding name would reduce instances of both the questions “Where are you from?” and “Do you speak Polish?”.
A third reason is an insight that you cannot verbalize for another ten years or so: that we Swedes are so free in our individualism that we punish people who don’t blend in, because who do they think they are? In Great Britain, they call it Tall Poppy Syndrome, in Sweden we call it Jantelagen (Jante’s Law). Your first seven years were spent in communist Poland, where everyone looked the same because they had few other options. Then you came to Sweden, a country with seemingly endless choices of stores and candy and fruit, where everyone looked and acted the same because they were afraid of being too individual. Drawing more than ‘lagom’ (Swedish word meaning moderate, just right and enough at the same time) attention to yourself put you at risk of being ‘too individual’. You intuitively understood that you have to blend in, whether you want to or not. The compromise was keeping your last name, Kazarnowicz, a more unique than your given name, since it’s a family name. It added a logically defensible amount of exotism to the mundane Michael you took. There was even a logical reason for choosing Michael. Your biological father was named Michał. Even though you neither knew him nor missed him, you felt that some sort of tribute was warranted, without seeing that having your father’s last name already was one. It was a confusing time, and it took a lot of your strength to squash the feelings. This third reason also circles back to identity: you kept Przemysław, but changed the Polish spelling of Jakub, your other middle name, to a less Polish: Jacob. You did keep a tribute, but it wasn’t Michael, for your biological father. It was Przemysław, for your Polish heritage.
A fourth reason: a new identity for yourself. I remember when you decided to go through with it. You were on a playground close to the junior high you soon were about to leave, thinking about what would happen next. You knew you would leave the working-class neighborhood for an upper-middleclass high school, thanks to your grades. A new circle of friends, who didn’t know you and had not yet judged you. With a new name, you could be a new person. A chance to be someone else, perhaps even someone who is gay? You were on the swings, knowing you needed a new name yet unsure of which. You thought about the names of the men in your life, but none felt remotely right. You thought about your biological father’s name, and thought Hm, that’s Michael in Swedish. But more importantly, it also worked in English. At that age, one of your secret dreams — one that I don’t think you’ve told a living soul at twenty, and that I’ve only told a handful at forty — is to follow Pet Shop Boys’ call to “Go West”. Smoking in your bedroom window to the soundtrack of Berlin’s “Take My Breath Away”, you watched the stars and dreamt of moving to the US. San Francisco seemed like a place where society didn’t constantly remind you to hate yourself, fag. I remember that you even kept track of compass directions, and preferred to move west because it felt like you were moving towards real home. Towards freedom.
If killing yourself at twenty was the worst-case scenario of your nightmares, this was the best-case scenario of your dreams. To be free, to be you, without being judged. The darker one was, the brighter the other had to be. It was so bright that you could not look at it directly. You couldn’t even dream directly of it, only of the symbols of it; you were like a sick person who yearns for health, but dreams of hospitals.
Part of me wishes I could tell that fifteen year old precocious, weird and wonderful gay kid that his wish would come true, in a way. That an August night nineteen years later he will meet an American man visiting Sweden for three days. That meeting will be the start of a story playing out in (at least) four cities (New York being one), a story still being made together with that caring, generous, intelligent, funny, challenging and hot guy.
Another part knows that it would have ruined the fun of finding out. It would be like recommending a particularly suspenseful movie by revealing who did it and what their motive was. I think that this is why I like Dan Savage’s and Terry Miller’s project It Gets Better so much. It’s a great compromise between these two parts. It’s an invitation to dream. If enough people say it, perhaps more LGBT kids dare to dream it?
Back to the question at hand: did you feel like an adult? Perhaps I first should ask the question: do I feel like an adult?
I realize that the answer to that depends on what you put in the proverbial bucket labeled adult. The term has such an age-span — can you really be as adult at twenty as I am at forty? Shouldn’t I be an… adultier adult? To me, adult is a intricate collection of patterns within patterns. Patterns like having a job or paying bills on time or having a dinner date with another couple. As times change, these patterns shift between generations. We learn what an adult is by looking at the patterns of our parental generation, but because times change we don’t need, or can’t have, some of those patterns. Perhaps wondering whether you’re adult enough is a prime characteristic of contemporary adulthood.
One thing I’ve been pondering for a while is that there’s something elitist about being an adult. I cannot imagine someone become offended for being treated like an adult, but I’ve seen many adults lose their shit because they think they’re being treated as kids; this tells me more about the way we treat kids, than it tells me about adults. I remember that you feel annoyed when people talk about childhood as innocent, free from cares and problems compared to adult life. You don’t agree. Twenty years later, I still don’t. There are few things that really scare an adult, that don’t scare a kid exponentially more. An adult has rationality, logic and experience to protect themselves from (some) monsters. An adult can make choices in a way a kid can not.
Back to the patterns of adulthood. On a basic level, all humans — whether kids or adults — consume the exact same type of patterns. Both kids and adults need to eat and, and have preferences about patterns in flavor, texture, smell etc. Both kids and adults like to play and be entertained, and have preferences of patterns when it comes to movies, books, music and play. Kids typically like simple patterns; very few two-year-olds love cheeses with a pungent odor, listen to experimental jazz or have Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal as their favorite movie. As we grow and learn, we grow bored of simple patterns and try on more complex ones until we grow bored of those too. I sometimes wonder if the drive to avoid boredom isn’t as innate a human ability as feeling love.
We expect an adult to prefer much more advanced patterns than a kid when it comes to movies, music, books, food, drinks and hundreds of other things — but we have no idea what the minimum required complexity is, for a pattern to pass as adult. Can a real adult prefer chocolate milk over a complex red wine? Vanilla ice cream over crème brûlée? Harry Potter over The Great Gatsby? This uncertainty easily leads to a one-upmanship with yourself and others. If my patterns in music, wine, cheese, chocolate, movies and books are more advanced than yours, then I am less childish, and therefore more adult, than you. Right?
You pretend to partake in that one-upmanship, like when you get to taste the wine at a restaurant. Still, to this day, they could switch a hundred dollar bottle for a one dollar one, and I would probably have no idea. I guess red wine never interested me enough for me to care. Neither do you, that’s why you just pretend without putting effort into it. If you like something, you like it regardless of whether it’s adult enough. If I remember correctly, The Fifth Element and Starship Troopers are two of your favorite movies (I still like both a lot by the way), you prefer a burger and fries to a bloody steak and I know you are an avid video gamer. In a few years, Bring It On will be another of your favorite movies, and when someone refers to it as a real guilty pleasure, you realize what that expression really means.
“Guilty pleasure” is the “no homo” of simple patterns. Saying that something is a guilty pleasure makes it okay for an adult to engage in it in moderation; it’s like a spell that protects your adulthood from the taint of being a kid. If “guilty pleasure” is the “no homo” of simple patterns, then “basic bitch” and “basic bro” are the slut-shaming. Stephen Covey wrote: we judge ourselves by our intentions, and others on their actions. And so, the others who indulge in patterns that are guilty pleasures for us, become basic bitches or basic bros.
Writing this makes me realize that we recognize that there’s a level above adult as well. We call those who have very complex pattern recognition in certain areas, snobs, nerds, geeks or obsessed. If it is a topic not worthy of an adult, we call it fan-boying or fan-girling because it’s childish. I wonder, do we compensate for how hard it is to define ourselves as good by compulsively defining others as less?
So, back to the question: do I feel like an adult? Before starting to write this letter, I would have said yes. Now I’m not sure anymore. Writing this, I’ve realized that adulthood is more defined by what it isn’t — childhood — than by what it is. You aren’t afraid of not being adult, you are afraid of being a child. I think that in part, it’s because being a child in some ways is so alien to you that you don’t know how. Don’t worry. You may have forgotten it, but I’m in the process of remembering how.
I know that you haven’t had that revelation of “does this mean I am an adult now?” at twenty, and I still haven’t at forty. In the process of writing this letter, I’ve asked many friends and a few strangers about the first time they felt like an adult. It’s strange to me that so many people have such a clear answer, but I realize that I’m the odd one out here. Anyway, all the answers so far have to to do with independence and responsibilities: financial (first real job or paying bills), living situation (moved from home), or both.
Signing that job with Ericsson made you feel more competent, but not more adult. When you move from home in 1999, you will feel more free but not more grown-up. It’s like the responsibility and freedom that people associate with the first time they felt adult gradually crept up on you from that time you failed at babysitting your brother when you were six. From then on, you got and took on a lot of responsibility. Meeting responsibility extends the domain of your freedom in a way, and once that domain reaches a certain point, it grows exponentially. Maybe that impossible-to-define point is when you became adult?
You acted like an adult with your name change. You didn’t ask permission to take a new name, or to change the spelling of one of your given names. You just ordered the form and filled it out. When a parent’s signature was needed because you were underage, you simply gave your mom the form to sign. It’s a testament to how independent she saw you at fifteen, when she signed without much questioning. Come to think of it, you were so headstrong and self-sufficient that from about that age, you more and more seldom asked for permission to do something. You simply informed mom that you were doing it. Remember that time she caught you smoking in your bedroom window? You thought she would go ballistic, but all she said was “You know that’s bad for you right?”
I think mom realized you were adult enough before you did. In many ways, you have been an adult since before your teens. In other ways you are little more than an adult tween. And you are not perfect, you never will be, and one day you’ll learn that all those imperfections that you so desperately hope someone will love you despite of, he will love you because of.
Love,
Me
This is a semi-finished chapter of a book I’m writing called “Letters From The Person I Needed When I was Younger”. Once it’s finished — the planned release is in 2018 — it will be available as paperback, e-book and audiobook on Amazon. All chapters will be available for free here on Medium, and if you want to support my writing it (and support keeping it available for free) you can help me in any of these ways:
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