Second Adolescence

I call 24–25 my second adolescence because that is developmentally what it felt like, not because I became younger. A bunch of experiences most people distribute across fifteen to nineteen hit me compressed into my mid-twenties, except I had adult autonomy, adult money sometimes, internet access, and none of the protective assumption that everybody else was equally inexperienced. Great combination lol.

Getting naked was weirdly important. I remember skinny dipping and the almost childishly simple realization that I was outside, naked, because I wanted to be, and nothing morally catastrophic was happening. [add exact scene] I had spent so long inside a framework where nakedness and sexuality carried all this regulatory charge that the physical experience could feel like recovering ownership of the body at the most literal level. I do not want to make it more profound than it was. Part of the feeling was just: holy shit, this is FUN. Skin, water, air, other people, no clothing. That is enough.

Sexuality itself got much less abstract. I had crushes. I noticed the way women looked. I also realized I liked the way some guys looked, which at first was another category my inherited model did not have a comfortable place for. I do not need to retroactively force every aesthetic attraction into an identity label. The raw fact is simpler: sometimes I looked at a guy and thought he was hot. Sometimes I looked at a woman and basically lost CPU. [add crushes/stories with names redacted where appropriate] The body did not care that I was late to interpreting it.

There are sexual stories I want in the full version because sanitizing them would defeat the project. Attraction, shame, awkwardness, what I wanted, what I actually did, what I did not do, how other people responded, moments where I was confident for no reason, moments where I froze, all of it. The distinction between desire and action matters here too. A memoir about inner life should not flatten fantasy into behavior or behavior into identity. Humans generate enormous internal search spaces. Most candidate actions never become policies.

Friendship was tangled with romance because I had less intuition for the boundary than people who had spent years practicing it. A close female friendship could contain emotional intimacy, attraction, safety, curiosity, and no stable label that captured the whole thing. At one point I explicitly did not care much about labels; I could imagine that later I would want one specific long-term partner, but I was still learning what types of closeness even existed. Being accepted by somebody could reduce shame around feelings I had previously treated as evidence of something wrong with me. [redact/replace identifying details]

There was grief underneath the excitement. Every new experience could carry its shadow: oh, people were doing versions of this ten years ago. Not because teenage sex or parties are inherently superior, but because learning alongside peers is different from arriving as an adult with a developmental hole. I could be genuinely happy and simultaneously furious that the happiness felt delayed.

The internet and San Francisco/Los Angeles social worlds accelerated everything. Attractive, ambitious, weird people everywhere. Parties and founders and shitposters and engineers and people with completely different moral priors from mine. I was no longer trying to inhabit one purified identity. I was sampling. Clothes, social presentation, flirting, bodies, relationships, beliefs. Some of that sampling produced stable updates. Some was just exploration.

[embed: photos from this period] [link: selected posts] [private/public split: sexual details curated intentionally] [annotation: names changed where necessary]

I do not want this chapter to end with "and then I became comfortable with myself." Too clean. I became more experienced. I became less afraid of some things. I learned that freedom can produce its own confusion. I remained capable of shame and loneliness and bad inference. But the option space was radically larger.

At the same time I was trying to become professionally legitimate in AI. Eventually I joined a company literally called AGI, which sounds like somebody wrote the setup for the next collapse with no concern for subtlety.