This morning I cursed under my breath as some dude took way to long to refill his Metrocard at the Union Street R station. I should be understanding but there was someone else in front of me and who knows how long that guy was going to take. The dude was in khakis and a button-down. He was going to work. So, clearly he lives here. Even the blond mom in athleisure with her three blonde children who was next to me in line for the other kiosk who was talking through the gate to another blond mom – also in athleisure – about how to work these machines was faster than this dude. Was he getting a Metrocard or trying to wire money to a goddamned Swiss bank account?

So, yeah, this is twenty years in New York.

At this point I can’t tell if New York made me this way or if I always was this way and New York just happens to fit.

I said a lot of the things that I wanted to say about being in New York last year when it was 19 years since my parents an I loaded up a UHaul and drove down here to move me into an apartment on the Upper East Side* so I could start my job as a consultant for a terrible company called WinMill (to my shock and amazement, they’re still around, google them).

*I once had way too long an argument with a woman about the fact that my neighborhood was actually Yorkville. I responded, “It’s upper. It’s east. It’s the Upper East Side. I’m done with this.” I’ve learned a lot in my twenty years here and I think it’s safe to say that 82nd and York is, in fact, Yorkville. But I’m still calling it the Upper East Side.

As you can see in the photo above, I have evidence of what 20 years can do to you. I was twenty-two in the picture on the left. I look fifteen. I took that selfie – when selfies weren’t really a thing – with a disposable Kodak camera. It had film in it and I had to take that film to get developed.

I took it while I was apartment hunting with my friends. I was pissed at how frustrating the search was. Little did I know that, by New York apartment search standards, it was fine.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes someone themselves. Is it a set of personality traits? Is it your thoughts? Is it your memory? Is it the continuity of experience? Some people speculate that we regenerate every cell in our bodies every seven years. If that’s true, I’m almost three people removed from that twenty-two year old.

I bring all that up because I don’t recognize the person that moved here twenty years ago (and count yourself lucky that in the paragraph above I spared you studies on the corpus callosum and if our brains contain multiple selves). I don’t think he has a plan. He’s a recent college graduate but I don’t know what he wants from life, other than an apartment in New York.

For the first twenty-one years of my life, I didn’t plan on moving to New York. But in the winter of my senior your of college, I visited my friend’s older brother and fell in love with the city. I had been to New York before and it felt dirty and claustrophobic but, in that January trip, we had all of these different places to go to. We went to an improv show (foreshadowing) and a party in the East Village. It was all here. There was this mobility and freedom to this place.

So, I got a job that gave me a reason to move here. They fired me after two months. I stayed. Now it’s twenty years later.

If the me from 1999 could see the me in 2019, would he be cool with what he saw?

I live on a tree-lined street in Brooklyn. I have a good job. I like to read. I like to write. I like to run. I still have a lot of the same friends, even though I’m the only one left in the five boroughs. I never got married or had kids but I don’t know if that guy wanted that. I’ve made comedy a part of my life and done probably over a thousand shows of stand-up, sketch, improv, and storytelling. I lost my parents but I’ve made peace with who they are and how they’re part of me and the ways that I don’t want to be like them.

The receding hairline sucks but that’s the tradeoff for the beard and, frankly, dudes our age with a thick, full head of hair just look kind of… off.

What I’m saying is, it’s a pretty good life.

Tonight, on the way home from therapy, walking through Union Square, I saw a guy with a free hugs sign. “Giving away free high fives and hugs!” he said. I gave him a high five, then thought what the hell. “Bring it in,” I said and I gave him a hug. I found myself smiling on the way down into the subway like an idiot.