Dear younger self,
There’s a lot I want to tell you.
I don’t want to scare you, but I need you to know that as you move through your teenage years and into adulthood, you’re going to face some serious challenges – chronic pain, depression, anorexia nervosa, self-harm, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, chronic fatigue/fibromyalgia…
At times, you will want to give up. You will feel completely and utterly hopeless, completely and utterly spent. You will tell yourself that you cannot do it anymore. But then you’ll keep going.
I need you to know that this resilience doesn’t necessarily feel good. People will praise you for your grit, praise you will cherish enormously, but it still won’t feel good, because it requires you to live through and live with difficult circumstances and emotions.
People will also praise your courage. While this makes you think of grand acts of heroism, often the most courageous thing you do is simply to put one foot in front of the other and go on. Even when you feel beaten by your illness, you will keep trying, and that is courage.
While at times you will wonder whether you’re getting anywhere at all, I think it’s important to emphasise that there will be good times and good experiences in your life as well as the challenges. At times, you will feel happy, satisfied, and at peace.
You need to know that happiness is not what you think it is. I know you think you’ll feel happy once you’ve perfected every aspect of your life, but you’ll never perfect every aspect of your life. You’ll never feel happy in the way you imagine, and yet you will feel happy, it’s just that happiness is something other than what you imagine it to be.
Perfection is not possible. To be human is to be imperfect, and you are human. This is something you will have to accept. Annihilating your imperfection is just as impossible as annihilating your humanness. Nonetheless, you won’t like the idea that you must accept imperfection. And you’ll rail against the idea that you ought to accept your illness. I know you’ll think I’m bonkers if I tell you that acceptance is the best, and perhaps the only, solution to some of your greatest challenges, but you’ll come to understand what I mean.
Acceptance, like happiness, is a journey. And on that journey, there will be significant trials. When your lovely GP first suggests accepting your chronic headaches, you will run away from the medical centre and sit in the park and library for hours by yourself, overcome by hopelessness and grief. And because no one will know where you are, the police will come and find you.
Your relationship with hope will also change wildly over the years. You’ll hate the notion for a time, then you’ll claim it as your own. You will hold infinite hope within you, and it will carry you through tremendous pain, both physical and emotional. You’ll endure year upon year of pain, but you’ll battle on. And despite it all, you will continue to hope for a better future, because there is a difference between blind faith that something will happen, and reasonable hope that it will.
Being willing to hope means being willing to try, and being willing to try means being willing to fail. You will fail many times at many things. Some of these failures will hurt, but failures are not fatal. You will pick yourself up and try again. And with practice, you will get better at failing – you can get better at any skill with practice.
Failing scares you because uncertainty scares you. Somehow, it feels safer not to try at all, because you know what will happen. You like knowing what will happen. You like that feeling of control. But it comes at a cost. And after paying for it time after time, you will learn to tolerate uncertainty.
Uncertainty is always found in the middle of a scale. It’s much easier to define the extremes than it is to define that golden mean. Anorexia and obesity are two ends of a scale, easy to define thanks to their extreme nature. Meanwhile, a healthy body is somewhere in the middle. While it’s hard to define what a healthy body is, it’s clearly a better option that anorexia or obesity.
You will never shed your desire to figure out exactly where the golden mean lies. It’s in your nature to think too much, and far too deeply. At times, this will be frustrating, but it is also one of your greatest gifts.
Because of it, you will exude intelligence. When you talk, people will listen. People will wonder how you know what the capital of Namibia is, and what year the International Criminal Court opened. But you won’t know these things because you have some wish to impress others. You will know them because you are deeply and irrevocably curious about life.
I’ll let you in on a secret – you will change a lot over the years. Your experiences will shape you into a deeply thoughtful, compassionate and ethically-minded individual. And you will come to love some of the things you currently detest. You’ll willingly go bushwalking with your family, you’ll cherish time alone, and you’ll listen to classical music by modern composers like Elena Kats-Chernin and Graeme Koehne.
So, you see, a lot will happen in the coming years of your life. I wanted to prepare you as best I could. You will struggle at times, I still struggle at times, but I promise the struggle is worth it.
Love, hope and peace from 21-year-old self.
Love Hope Peace 