Reluctant Letter to my Younger Self

Dear baby Rose,

I’m writing this letter many, many weeks after it was suggested to me by one of our readers. Oh yeah, you have a blog now. Anyway, I didn’t really want to write this letter for a variety of reasons, but I find myself today (Tuesday aka blog-posting day) without any real idea of what to write so I figured I might as well.

Letters to your younger self are something of a cliché, baby Rose. Since this is meant to be addressing 15-year-old baby Rose, I’m sure you have already had to write one for class. I mean, I get the point of them—letters such as these are meant to help the author reflect on how far they’ve come and give them a chance to impart the advice they wish they had gotten on readers of a similar age to their younger self.

It’s a great way to give yourself a little pep-talk, certainly. “Baby Rose, you are strong and will get through your hard times”, “baby Rose, you will find yourself and your place in the world”, blah blah. But you know, baby Rose, I don’t think you want to hear that. I don’t think you need to hear how everything will work out. You already know you have a wonderful and privileged life and being reminded that, “everything will work out just fine,” only serves as another reason for you to be even more aware of how different you feel from your less lucky friends.

Baby Rose, you will learn to accept your privilege and you will always work to figure out how to exercise your privilege correctly. Sometimes it’s out of guilt, and sometimes you don’t even realize you’re doing something with it until after the fact. The best thing you figure out how to do is to not apologize for it, but humbly recognize it and encourage your family to recognize it. I don’t think knowing that you come to terms with things in the future would really help the current you, though, baby Rose.

Your teenage years are and will be and were some of the most vibrant times of your little life. You are so acutely aware of how your crazy hormone feelings are more a product of puberty than anything else, and that still doesn’t help you. And nothing I say will be different than anything you’ve already said to yourself in that regard. I would tell you to work harder on finding simple things that give you joy, to work on the crafts and arts you were always nervous to do, but honestly, baby Rose, I don’t want you to change at all.

I don’t want you to have this letter. I don’t wish there was anything I could say to you right now, and I don’t actually want to help you. I like the way you slept in until 11am on the weekends and stayed up too late during the school week talking to your friends. I like how you never really committed yourself to volleyball or any particular field of study, because everything was interesting and why should you ever have to choose? I like how you didn’t know how to interpret your feelings towards the first boy who ever loved you. I like how you will accidentally miss the drama you sort of catalyzed thanks to college applications. I like how you choose to go to a very hard school all the way across the country even though you know you are in no way prepared because you have been able to skate by without trying for all of high school.

I like who you are and who you will become, baby Rose. And I wouldn’t tell you a single thing that would change the person you are today.

Love,

Yourself