It Feels Like Everyone Else Started Life Before We Did

Why so many gay men feel behind, even when they’re exactly where they’re supposed to be.

The third wedding invitation of the year landed this morning.

I’m genuinely happy for them. I’ll go, I’ll mean every word of the toast and I’ll probably be one of the last people to leave.

And underneath all of that, just for a second, something in my chest goes tight.

I don’t think it’s jealousy though, I think it’s more like grief.

Not grief for their life , but grief for a version of mine that never quite happened.

Because there are moments when it still feels like everybody else got a head start…and I don’t think we talk enough about that.

The WhatsApp group that used to be about nights out and who pulled is now scan photos, stag dos and “can’t, got the kids this weekend.” The group holidays quietly become couples only. Family dinners are punctuated by kind questions about “when it’ll be your turn.”

You love these people. You really do.

But every now and then it can feel a bit like reading postcards from a country you don’t live in.

And perhaps that’s the strangest part.

It’s entirely possible to be grateful for your life and still feel left behind by it.

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We were doing a different kind of growing up

I think we’ve got the story wrong.

Your straight mates got to spend their teenage years doing what teenage years are for. Falling in love, fumbling through first relationships, figuring out who they were and practising on each other while everyone else was doing the same thing.

A lot of us didn’t.

We were doing a different job first.

Working out who we even were.

Often on our own and often in secret.

Before we could think about relationships, intimacy or the future, we had to make peace with ourselves.

That’s years of emotional labour that rarely gets acknowledged.

So when your first proper relationship arrived at twenty-six, or thirty, or even later, it wasn’t because you were slow.

It’s because your timeline was different from the beginning.

You weren’t late. You were just elsewhere.

Why it still feels like everyone is ahead

I still catch myself doing the maths.

The friend who married the person they met at eighteen. The house deposit they started saving for while I was still catching up on myself. The quiet, dizzying realisation that I’d already lived through several versions of who I was before they’d even had a second relationship.

And sometimes we tell ourselves a little white lie.

“I didn’t really want that anyway.”

Maybe you didn’t want all of it.

But perhaps you wanted some of it.

That’s allowed.

You can be grateful for your life and still mourn the timeline you never got.

I actually think this feeling is more common than we realise because nobody gave us language for it. We’ve become very good at celebrating the bravery of coming out, but we don’t talk nearly enough about the years that came before it. The years spent trying to understand yourself while everyone else was busy becoming themselves.

Those years count too.

Maybe we were never behind at all

The older I get, the more I wonder whether the head start wasn’t really a head start.

Maybe it was a script.

School. Work. Partner. House. Kids.

Most people were handed one.

We weren’t.

For a long time, that felt like being left out.

Lately, it’s started to feel like something else.

Because if you spend long enough building a life from scratch, eventually you realise that almost everything in it was chosen.

That doesn’t make the feeling disappear. I still get it at weddings. I’ll probably get it for years to come.

But perhaps it isn’t really about being behind.

Perhaps it’s simply the feeling of taking a longer, stranger road to adulthood than the people around us.

Because nobody handed you a timeline.

You’ve been quietly drawing one yourself the entire time.

And while there were plenty of moments nobody stopped to celebrate, there’s something strangely comforting about reaching your mid-thirties and realising that almost every line on the page is there because you put it there.

Big love,

James 💙

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