I’ve made stupid decisions – this is the advice I’d give my teenage self

Drag queen Alaska shares the advice she would give her teenage self as part of Daniel Harding’s book Letters to My Younger Queer Self: Inspiring, influential voices from the LGBTQIA+ community.

Dear Younger Self,

I have a serious problem with this assignment as I vehemently believe that travelling back in time and tampering with the past is a sure-fire way to throw off the current timeline.

If you read this information from your future self, it will surely alter the course of events within your own life and beyond. Reading this letter could cause massive devastation, nuclear disaster, or worse – The Golden Girls might never get made.

Perhaps there are some general, evergreen pieces of advice that might be useful to you and anyone reading this without throwing off the space-time continuum:

• Learn to meditate. Even if you don’t do so regularly, knowing how to do it will give you something to do if you are ever buried alive.
• Stretching is good for you.
• If you watch Sex and the City, watch it in the knowledge that Carrie Bradshaw is an unsympathetic protagonist – not a role model.

I want to avoid getting too specific with you, Younger Self. If I tell you that you’ll grow up and be paid way too much money to dress up in long blonde hair, excessive make-up and tight, flowing dresses, I’m not sure if you’d believe me.

I also doubt you’d believe that you drive an electrical space car and have a magical device in your pocket that can play any episode of any of your favourite TV shows on command. That’s pretty cool though.

I won’t tell you, however, that this same magical device is also a source of pain, worry, annoyance and this new, ever-present thing from the future we call ‘anxiety’.

If I attempt to tell you useful information that’s good for your health, like ‘don’t drink too much’, it could have the same effect that all those years in the D.A.R.E Program [Drug Abuse Resistance Education] had.

In which case you’ll end up not drinking or doing anything against the rules until you’re 18, and then you’ll do pretty much all of them all at once the second you get to college.

Which I guess worked out fine. But as a general rule, avoiding cocaine and drinking a little bit less is pretty much categorically always better in every imaginable way.

I could tell you not to make really stupid decisions. Don’t drive your bike home drunk without a helmet from Faultline. Don’t drive out of the city to meet some guy and then get stoned and realise you don’t want to hook up with him, so he makes you leave and you have to drive terrifyingly stoned all the way home.

Don’t try to hitch-hike your way out of Burning Man to get back to LA. But wait – if you don’t do that, then you’d never end up losing your job at Circus of Books, and then you’d never end up moving to Pittsburgh, and then you’d never end up getting into a relationship with Sharon, which would then mean you’d probably never get on RuPaul’s Drag Race.

And if you don’t end up on Drag Race, I’m not sure what you’d be doing because being a Ru Girl has been the only job you’ve ever held for longer than a year. See, this timeline business is tricky.

I could tell you to appreciate your parents, especially your father, because you will be faced with losing him in a very sudden and terrible way. But then if I told you that, you’d probably see to it that he never gets on a motorcycle again and then you’d really be cramping his style and taking away a hobby that he truly loved. So just be nice to your parents and tell them you love them.

I could tell you to make really shrewd business decisions – like, creating a make-up line right after you win All Stars. But then you’d have as much money as Trixie Mattel and honestly, no one needs that much money.

But no – enough! I want you to avoid reading any of this, Younger Self. Your drinking, drug use, career missteps and litany of all-around horrible decisions have created a rich and bizarre tapestry that led you to the place where you are now.

You’re almost 40, you’re generally healthy and generally happy. You’re on your patio, the sky is blue and there’s a hummingbird sucking nectar from the feeder your sister got you last Christmas – and in this very moment, for you, everything’s pretty OK.

But now that I think about it, the current state of the planet Earth is terrifying, abysmal and borderline hopeless.

Maybe if you read this transmission from the future it will cause massive changes to your life’s timeline and therefore to the world. Maybe there’s a chance there will be less war and predation.

Less dishonesty and greed. Less hunger and pain.

So, Younger Self, read on. What harm can it do?

Alaska

Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing jess.austin@metro.co.uk. 

Share your views in the comments below.