A Letter to Me

July 11th/2018

Thirteen year old me,

The next few years are going to be some of your worst. You’re going to have your first kiss. It’s exactly what you hoped for, but the boy doesn’t have the heart you thought he did. Twelve years later, you still think of it every time that song comes on.

You’re going to spend years waiting to go on the Outdoor Club camping trip but be told at fifteen that you can’t go all because of an awful rumor. Of all sources, it started with the P.E teacher. Eventually you get your apologies but that’s when you learn that sometimes ‘Sorry’ can’t fix everything.

At sixteen you’re going to give Dad an ultimatum and he isn’t going to choose you. The last words he’ll choose to say to you are that you let him down. You didn’t. You will spend years of your life feeling like you aren’t enough, but the truth is that you are simply too much for someone who perceives themselves as not enough. This will come up for you time and time again but every single time someone tells you what it is they can’t love about you, you’ll realize that that is PRECISELY what you love the most about yourself. If anything, he taught you to love yourself first.

High school is not a compilation of your best years. You are going to fuck up a lot in a very short amount of time. You’re going to try and get good grades but still end up sleeping through an entire semester of Chemistry. You’re going to crash mom’s truck and get her ID confiscated by the police. You’re going to breach some peoples trust and never get it back. Worst of all, you’re going to tell mom that you hate her even though you never could. Once you say it, you can never take that back. All of these things shape you and set the standards you hold for yourself in future years.

University is going to be another thing all together. You’re going to face some betrayal, but out of it you end up getting the person that means the most to you in this world. You’re going to endure a lot of firsts. First time flashing the cops, attempting to fight the cops, running from the cops, and being driven home by the cops. You’re going to follow that up by breaking your first heart. Out of everything, that’s the one you regret the most. You’re going to have your first one night stand, pay your first electricity bill, and eventually date your first Australian. These things all happen again and again, and I promise the novelty wears off. After four years of Tequila Tuesdays, existential crises, and textbook debt, you’ll graduate with your dream degree surrounded by your friends and family. Your family is so supportive that they actually pick you up from a booty call the morning after you walk the stage. For the first, and hopefully last, time.

You’re going to get your heart broken a lot. Or sometimes just think you’ve had your heart broken.

At twenty-three you’ll have your heart broken for real. It’ll hit you so hard that you can’t breathe and you come to a point where you don’t even realize you’re still crying, but you are and the tears don’t dry for months. But with that heartbreak, you figure out what real love is for the first time too, when your best friend wraps herself around you and holds you until it hurts a little less. It takes a long time, but eventually it doesn’t hurt at all. You’ll try and fill the space he left with many men but it’ll take fourteen months before you actually let yourself fall asleep beside another person. When you wake up the next morning, you pack your bag and realize there’s nothing you really like about him at all.

You are going to have an extravagant life. You are going to see more in your first twenty-five years than most people do in their lifetime. You’re going to live abroad. More times than you can fathom. You’re going to jump out of airplanes, swim with sharks, and dance in Thai lady boy cabarets. At one point you are going to be one of the most educated unemployed people you know. You’re going to feel like you have your life together for the first time ever at twenty-four and it’ll only last the eleven minutes it takes you to walk home from work. The rest of the time you’ll feel like your stumbling. You are. Embrace it. You are going to get rejected in the most hilarious ways. Sometimes it hurts, sometimes it goes viral. You grow into someone who isn’t afraid to laugh at herself and shares her story with everyone she meets. Even Grandpa knows the two-pairs-of-shorts story.

It’s a good one. You’ll love it.

You’re going to struggle with your body image. Actually, you’re actually going to struggle with your self-perception at every level. But know that you turn out to be kind, smart, funny, and beautiful – even when you don’t necessarily feel it. You are going to outgrow a lot of people and others will leave before you’re done with them. It takes a while, but you do come to peace with the fact that others can only meet you so far as they’ve met themselves. You are going to dole out forgiveness you said you’d never give, but it will make you better in every sense of the word. You are going to literally and figuratively cross oceans for people who wouldn’t cross ponds for you, but it’s worth it every damn time.

Most importantly you end up loving yourself. Every flaw. Every fuck up.