jump to the future

Dear 14-year-old me,
This is your future self speaking. With auto-correct of course, otherwise everything would be lower-case. You may not believe where you could get, nine years from where you are right now. But let me assure you, things will get much better. And much worse. But you’ll survive through it all. You’re a pretty tough kid; don’t let anyone get you down.

To help you out, here are some things I’ve learnt over the last nine years.

1. Change is good. No matter how much we hate it (we really do!), it ends up taking us to fascinating new places where we have to rough it out, but remember it forever. In a good way and a bad way.

2. You can trust boys. They’re not all bad. They’re just really different from us. You’ll see. Don’t write them all off as soon as you meet them. But don’t hero-worship the ones that impress you either. Those charming ones are actually the ones you should be wary of. Very wary of.

3. You actually love your sister. Yeah, we’re very different, but there will come a day pretty soon when you discover that she has issues and deals with them very differently from we do. And you’ll love her for it. And for all the designer hand-me-downs :)

4. You like writing. It’s something you’ll be surprised to discover, but it may end up defining who you are. Not may, it probably will.

5. You’ll lose a heck of a lot of weight. Stop worrying so much about your appearance. You’re a sweet kid. You’ll probably get a lot less sweet as you age. Sigh.

6. You need to stop dreaming so much. It’s a waste of time and dreams rarely come true. Those type of fantastical shit dreams anyway. Get realistic and be more proactive. Other people can’t make your dreams come true for you. You have to do it all on your own.

7. Heads up. Don’t bother joining television journalism. It’s horrendous. You’ll also discover you have a passion for animals and don’t know what to do with the two things you love – writing and animals. Do some research. Find out what your options are.

8. The next two-and-a-half years of your life are going to ROCK. Yes, you’ll miss Ma like crazy, but trust me, that new school is going to be awesome. And you’ll meet some of your future best friends and rock support systems there. So stop crying and just sit back, relax, and have a blast. They’ll be the best childhood years of your life. (hopefully not *the* best ever. I’m hoping post 23 we’ll also see some good times :P sigh)

9. Erm so we have a problem with men. We like the messed up ones. There’s no point in me warning you, given how stubborn we are, but please try to be careful. In fact, why don’t you try changing the trend and picking one of those many “sweet, nice” boys who will hit on you after you join college. Yes, the nerdy ones. They really are sweet. There will probably come a time when we’ll wonder, “what if…. I had picked one of them?” Go for it! The bad ones… well, they’re bad. It comes to a point where you will discover even the seemingly “good” one we liked is messed up. Sheesh. I know, right!

10. Do you know what a defense mechanism is? Well we’ve got a pretty strange set of those mechanisms you haven’t discovered yet – sarcasm, silence, a lot of rules, arrogance and whatnot. But strangely, there will come one or two people whom you feel good about and just allow into your life. Not a very good decision, but you’ll learn a hell of a lot from it. And you’ll survive.

Time to bid goodbye. One may say “be good”, if they were a parent. But I’d really rather we weren’t *so* good. It’s really okay to be bad once in a while. So relax, kid. Have some fun :) enjoy the ride.

love,
your 23-year-old self