An Open Letter To My Teenaged Self

Hey, Teenage Me,

Guess What?

You are going to be every single teenage cliché that ever existed. (Apart from teenage pregnancy. You won’t be that one.) But all the others?

Yeah, you’re going to be them…

You’ll skip class to hang out with boys, spend far too much time binge watching trashy TV shows, have the sleeping pattern of a fruit bad, a terribly unhealthy relationship with Facebook, and as for your style? Well, that’s going to be unforgiveable in ways that I can’t even count.

I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you how badly some of that is going to suck, but let me break a few things down for you anyway…

We may as well get this one out of the way early…

You know how you spend all that time daydreaming about being super world famous? Well, that’s not going to happen. You won’t be a millionaire by the time you’re 21, you won’t walk the Victoria’s Secret fashion show, and you won’t own a penthouse apartment in Manhattan (you won’t even go there until you’re twenty six.) Keep those ideas in your head though – it’ll do you good to dream about something – just know that you aren’t going to be the seventeen year old who gets spotted by some Hollywood hotshot, who just happened to be frequenting your local supermarket.

Speaking of Hollywood…your life isn’t going to play out like a romance movie – like you always thought it would. You will often feel like that classic, wide-eyed, dippy girl who stars in one though. Mainly because you’re going to be the type of person who falls in love in a three second maximum. It means you’re going to get your heart flattened quite a lot (it’s what happens when you put it out there so willingly) in fact it’ll often feel like it’s completely shattered, but I promise it isn’t.

Everything you feel will get better eventually.

(You might just have to watch the SATC box set a few times to get there.)

Sometimes it’ll be you who’s the problem. You’re going to break some hearts, and that won’t ever feel good, but rest assured that you’ll only ever do it for the right reasons. You’ll do it because you’re someone who is looking for real love (the kind Carrie taught you about when you were watching that box set.) Nothing less.

It means you’ll actually spend most of your time being the single one of the group.

You will both love this and hate it in equal measure. That’s perfectly normal. Just like it’s perfectly normal to lose some people along the way. You see, while you’re going to be lucky enough to meet a load of super cool people, you’re also going to meet some super toxic people. Sometimes they’ll whisper behind your back, and sometimes they’ll just outright insult you in every way possible. You’ll bottle it up for a long time and pretend to be okay with it, but the sooner you cut them out your life the sooner you’ll realise they were never all that nice to you in the first place. Do yourself a favour and make sure you surround yourself with only the right people. Life is hard enough without trying to dodge passive aggressive comments from fake friends.

Especially when you’re the person who can’t even figure out how to handle lunch. Yeah, seriously, lunch. And all the other meals for that matter. You’re going to so bad at dieting. Like, Biblically bad. You won’t go on fad diets as much as you’ll just quit eating for days at a time. Then you’ll do the opposite and consume the entire contents of the fridge. For a smart person it’s going to take you a real long time to figure out how dumb that is. Just like it’s going to take you a real long time to have a healthy approach to exercise. For years you’ll be caught in this hate-it/obsessed-with-it cycle, and the only thing you’ll really achieve by doing that is finding a different way to punish yourself.

You’ll save yourself from it eventually but gosh, that one’s going to take some serious work.

But here’s the good news…

After all those horrible dates, and those poisonous friends, and all that time you never had a clue what you should or shouldn’t be putting in your mouth… you’ll grow up and still be a wide-eyed, dippy girl who has dreams that are bigger than the Universe. They will never take that away from you.

And although you’ll have to work your way through a lot of issues (like, a whole heap of them) and work really hard at everything you do (you’re never going to be that girl who casually glides through life, making everything appear effortless) one day you’ll look back and understand what it all meant.

You’ll be able to write better things because of it. You’ll be able to write things that matter.

And – while you’re saying so yourself – you can be sure that your heart will always be in exactly the right place. So remember to be kind to yourself.

It’s all going to be fine. I promise.

Love,

Older You