Dear younger me,
Life is going to suck. You'll go through a traumatic event before the age of 10, you will move 1,500 miles away from your family, friends and everything you know at 14. You will start a new school two years in a row because here they do junior high instead of middle school. You'll become severely depressed and anxiety ridden, struggle with suicide on a daily basis and become anorexic by the age of 16.
You'll go through a serious of relationships until you find the one you think is the one but is not in fact the one. Not in the sense that you're thinking. He won't be the one you spend the rest of your life with. He will be the one to teach you about abuse. The next one you think is the one, but again you're wrong. He is the one that in the end will teach you about manipulation. You'll find out your mother has Lupus, you will lose your grandfather who was like your father and best friend in one person, and you will lose all your friends. All between the age of 16 and 21.
Your junior year in college you will decide to go to therapy because your depression and anxiety have followed you throughout your life and you aren't sure how to handle it anymore. You feel lost, you'll cry yourself to sleep most nights for the first time since you were 17. You'll notice you aren't taking care of yourself again. You've stopped eating as much, taking care of your skin and you stopped putting in as much effort in school.
Life will suck, I promise you it gets better.
Yes, you will go through a traumatic event before the age of 10. But that event will make you one of the strongest people you know. Yes, you will move 1,500 miles away but you will still have your best friend for almost 10 years. Yes, you will start a new school twice, gain new friends only to lose them, but it will teach you the value of true friendship. You will learn what you need, what you want and you won't tolerate anything less.
Yes, you will go to therapy in college and it won't be the first time that you have gone. But what you will learn there will follow you and you will feel better than you had since you moved away from everything. Yes, you will lose your grandfather and your mother will be sick. But you will heal and lean how to handle it. You will be fine.
Yes, you will go through a series of relationships that will be hard, depressing and even cause issues within your family and within yourself. Trust me, you need to go through those relationships because your senior year you will meet someone. If it be fate, a coincidence or just weird timing, you'll meet a boy in your class that is in a completely different major than you. You'll be put together with another student to work on a quarter long project. You'll bond over memes, anime and the hatred of the class. You'll spend long nights playing board games and watching YouTube. Before you know it, you will be dating for four months and he will give you a promise ring for graduation. Because you went through those terrible relationships, you will know that this boy is actually the one.
And finally, yes you will be suicidal and anorexic. It will hurt physically, mentally and emotionally. The damage will follow you, for how long I can not say. What I can say is you will gain the weight back. It will take about five years for you to truly look like yourself again, but you will be better. The thoughts will disappear, a practice you will need to work on for several years. It will be something you talk about with your therapist. You will have slips and moments where you revert back to how you used to be, but you will have people who truly care about you to help you back up again.
Life will suck, but it won't stay that way. You'll want things to end, and they will. You just have to give it time. A few years might seem like a lot, even one year can seem like forever. But things will turn out alright, and you will be happy. You'll do amazing things. You will have met poets and authors, gone to the largest writing conference in the country two years in a row, been published across four issues of literary journals, been editor-in-chief of your schools literary journal, made amazing friends, found yourself and a wonderful partner and graduated with a bachelors degree, the first in your family.
Life doesn't suck. Your life in that moment sucks. But I promise you that life as whole will be wonderful. So stick around — you won't want to miss it.
