What I'd Tell My 20-Year Old Self

Not an original question, but an interesting game nonetheless.

I CELEBRATED MY 22ND birthday in Paris, having fled there after college graduation with no clue what was next, and a desire to do something, anything, as long as it was, um, spectacular. OK, fine. I wasn’t the first person to flee to Paris. But it sure felt new to me, which is all that matters.

The same feeling of newness, that never-been-done-before quality, seized the world-weary Joan Didion, who I have a hard time believing was ever 21, despite all the evidence she presents in her famous essay Goodbye to All That. Go ahead. Give it another read. It’s better than anything I’ll ever write. Including her brilliant observation that “one of the mixed blessings of being twenty or twenty-one or even twenty-two is the conviction, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, that nothing like this has ever happened to anyone ever before.”

When I was her age, bashing around Paris, the U.K., Ireland, and the Continent, I was somehow possessed with the notion that I was special, and would lea…