Sometimes I wonder if the old me would like the new me. Quite honestly, the person I used to be would loathe the person I am now, but she also didn’t even like herself. I wish I could have been your own best friend, so you could make friends with what you were, what you are, and what you would be.
Dear 18-year-old me,
I wish I was around to tell you this, but I wasn’t. If I was around to help you figure out what to do, you would have never learned how to make decisions on your own. You are so much stronger because of everything you overcame. I know you would have laughed rudely in someone’s face upon hearing this fact. You would have said that this person was a liar and stormed angrily out of the room followed by the distressed sound of a slamming door. Oh, old "young" me, you were always impatient that way. What if I told you how patient you would become?
You will come so far.
Every day you will be surprised by just how far you made it. Your catch phrase will be, “At least I’m not in high school.” None of this would have happened if you had given up, which you almost did, too many times to count. I’m glad you didn’t, even though I know how terribly you wanted to. Sometimes you still want to, but you don’t. You promised yourself you never would. You wanted something, anything or anyone, to let you know it was going to be OK. I know this is three years late, but here it is: it is going to be OK.
You were so worried about what people thought of you and if you were making the right decisions. You had a perfectly logical reason to think this; high school always seems to magnify these questions with a microscope, leaving you burning under the fluorescent light. It took a while, but after a few years you learned the truth. You didn’t know what you wanted to do — that was perfectly OK.; it didn’t matter what other people thought — that was OK; and you were not OK — but that was OK.
Guess what? In three years, you don’t hate yourself anymore. Even though you were at such a low point, having known what it felt like to be there, in that deep pit with no light, now, you will want everyone around you to know their worth, and to see with eyes that do not make the sun gray.
I can bore you with facts: you will make new friends and lose old friends. You will also lose old friends and keep new friends. In fact, you will meet some of the most amazing people in the coming years and wonder how you got so lucky? You will make art, fall in and out of love, and it will all be worth it. It will be worth every single moment you suffered. You will come to love life. You learned that having hope meant keeping an open mind.
Most of all, I am proud of you. How you got from A to B, from old you to new me, and helped you to understand. You will question many things, but never why you went through certain obstacles.
Love,
“Current You”
