The Meat Grinder and the Fist: Advice to 20-Year-Old Rob

What is something you wish you could tell your 20-year-old self?

The Electricity of 1994

I was 20 in 1994. Exactly 32 years ago, I was likely hovering around local concert venues. I emphasize “concert venues” because I wasn’t legal drinking age yet, but I was desperate to immerse myself in that club environment. Music was my entire world—the most financially and emotionally invested I have ever been. It was the height of the alternative rock explosion, when everyone was convinced Seattle was the new musical Mecca. Kurt Cobain had taken his own life just a few months prior, and though we didn’t realize it then, nobody was going to step in to fill that void in the cultural zeitgeist.

If I could speak to that 20-year-old version of myself, I’d start by saying: It gets better. I’d also tell him, perhaps a bit cynically, that the music scene won’t ever reach these heights again. There will be good moments, but nothing will ever replicate the electricity of 1994. I’d also give him some pragmatic life advice: Go get tickets to Woodstock ’94. You saw Metallica at Pine Knob two days prior, but that festival was a once-in-a-lifetime event. Watching it on pay-per-view just wasn’t the same.

The Pressure and the Meat Grinder

At 20, you’ve built sex up to be the end-all, be-all of human existence. You’re a virgin, and you’re carrying that weight like a heavy stone—I refer to this mindset as the “Cameron Frye syndrome.” My advice? Get out there and live. Don’t put so much stock into it. You are about to hit an emotional meat grinder in a few months when a girl you’re seeing effectively ghosts you. You’ll spend your 21st birthday home with mono, likely a parting gift from that experience. It will be your first real emotional ass-kicking, but it will teach you resilience.

You need that. You have to be knocked down a few times to understand how to get back up. If I had known “Option C” then, I would have stopped trying the moment she pulled away. I would have walked away, respected my own time, and refused to eat the breadcrumbs. But I had to endure the grinder to become the person who finally understands that choosing myself is the only way to live.

I was 20 in 1994. Exactly 32 years ago, I was likely hovering around local concert venues. I emphasize “concert venues” because I wasn’t legal drinking age yet, but I was desperate to immerse myself in that club environment. Music was my entire world—the most financially and emotionally. invested I have ever been. It was the height of the alternative rock explosion, when everyone was convinced Seattle was the new musical Mecca. Kurt Cobain had taken his own life just a few months prior, and though we didn’t realize it then, nobody was going to step in to fill that void in the cultural zeitgeist.

The audacity of choosing myself

Go have fun. Hit the shows, go to the games, and do things strictly for yourself. You have a level of freedom right now that will never exist again. Responsibilities are coming, and they will arrive faster than you expect. Within 18 months, you’ll meet the woman you’ll fall madly in love with and marry. Eleven years after that, you’ll be divorced. It will be a long, complicated road. It sounds like a Wonderful Life cliché, but I wouldn’t trade any of it—not the heartbreak, not the loss, and not the lessons. Those experiences are the crucibles that forged who I am.

Stop waiting for external validation. Choose yourself, every single time. I can only imagine the life I would have built if I had been fully implementing “Option C” for the last 30 years, but I’m exactly where I need to be.

Rebuilding a life takes grit, consistency, and a lot of ‘Option C’ thinking. Having crossed the 1,000-day milestone, I’m now charting the territory beyond. The mission remains the same: No glitz. Just the work. New to the blog? Start your journey here to see the blueprint and the ‘Tricorder’ perspective behind the rebuild.

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The article “The Meat Grinder and the Fist: Advice to 20-Year-Old Rob “ first appeared on Rebuilding Rob

Rebuilding Rob