In a pre-Covid world, most people in their twenties were lucky to have no anxiety around their health.
We're free to party, toke the occasional cig, sleep with whoever we want to, and nurse our hangovers with fast food and sleep.
But for many young gay men, including myself, the fear surrounding HIV and Aids can be crippling - even if we're not exposing ourselves to potential infection.
In the '80s, the Aids crisis, also known as the 'gay plague', had the world in a panicked chokehold. It was seen as a stark death sentence, a self-inflicted consequence of a dirty lifestyle; a decade of tragedy.
And while medical understanding has advanced by leaps and bounds - the stigma surrounding the virus still echoed on to younger generations.
I was six years old when Section 28 was finally abolished in England and Wales. The notorious law, brought in during Thatcher's administration, prohibited schools from talking about homosexuality.
But a decade later, at the ripe old age of 16, I still hadn't received any form of LGBTQ+ sex education at secondary school or sixth form.
I didn't know that HIV was no longer the death sentence that it once was, or what 'undetectable' meant, or why as a teen who hadn't even had sex I was so afraid of it.
Because I really was petrified at times.
At school, you'd regularly hear jokes about people being "bummed" and "getting Aids" - but no teacher attempted to correct the ignorance or debunk the myths.
And for some reason, I couldn't talk to anyone about my constant panic of dying - because the stigma surrounding the virus is still rife, and education is still so poor.
In fact, according to sexual health charity Terrence Higgins Trust, the most recent estimate suggests there were 105,200 people living with HIV in the UK in 2019. Of these, around 6,600 are undiagnosed and do not know they are HIV positive.
Equally alarming, 13 percent of people living with HIV have never shared their status with anyone outside of their healthcare workers.
Now, my experience with health anxiety is nothing compared to the thousands of people living with HIV who face discrimination on a daily basis.
But it highlights how strong the reverberations of the '80s crisis are - and how important it is we begin to educate children about HIV.
Today is World Aids Day - but headlines surrounding Covid continue to dominate. Perhaps because Aids is still seen as a gay comeuppance that doesn't really affect the straight world - or maybe because the stigma is so ingrained into our society it's impossible to smash.
But we must break through. If not, history could easily repeat itself.
