Dear Charlotte,
these are the things I wish I’d known at 18.
Life happens. Time passes.
Not everything is a lesson.
There will be days you wake up terrified, for no reason at all. The hollow in your chest never completely goes away, but there will come a day when you accept it, and when that day comes, everything changes.
You will begin to see Life in a different way. Not better, not worse. Just different.
You will find your version of truth, and you will work hard on accepting it. You will stop shoving your opinions down other people’s throats. You’ll stop expecting second chances. Instead, you will find yourself thinking before you act.
Hard as it is to imagine, you will find yourself.
You will make all the mistakes you thought you wanted to make.
You won’t always regret them.
You might be ashamed for a while, but eventually, that too, passes.
You will learn to acknowledge that you won’t always be the best version of yourself.
But, you will always be confident.
You will forget how to be shy. You grow into your own skin. You stop second-guessing yourself. You stop caring about other peoples’ opinions.
You won’t be in love with him forever.
That lesson will make you sad.
You will wonder, for the longest time, if there’s something wrong with you. A missing genome or mutation that renders you incapable of “loving” someone else the way books and movies describe.
You’ll outgrow this obsession with fantasy love. You’ll stop chasing ghosts.
Unfortunately, you won’t ever outgrow your depression. It will hit you when you least expect it to. What you will learn, though, is how to cope. You will learn to ride the waves of indifference, the crests of mania. You will learn how to hold your breath when your thoughts tsunami.
You won’t spend days in bed, unmoving. Instead, you will acknowledge your pain, your numbness, your un-nameable sadness, and you will continue on with Life.
You will learn how to validate yourself, instead of blindly justifying.
One day, after the dust and debris has settled, you will think that you’re ready, once again, for Love. Not because you’re lonely. God, no. That’s the one thing you can be confident about. You will cease feeling lonely. You will think you’re ready for Love because you no longer crave companionship. You no longer need someone to flatter you, or hold you.
Every self-help book you’ve ever read will lead you to this conclusion, that because you’re finally at peace with yourself, you are ready for a relationship. Don’t believe them.
Don’t believe them because Life isn’t a to-do list with neat little chores that you need to check off.
In fact, don’t believe me, because I am at the crossroads, right now.
Sinking into self, trying not to become complacent in my self-actualization. Wondering, if maybe, this “actualization”, isn’t just fictionalized and romanticized in my head.
Know, however, that this too, will pass. It always does.
Life happens. Time passes.
Not everything is a lesson.
You will have done the best you could at 18, so don’t despair. Or do. Do, because who I am today was created by your mistakes, your triumphs, your despairs and, amidst all that, your happiness.
You are the catalyst that brought me here, today.
Maybe that is the lesson. That everything I’ve learnt, stems from you.
Thank you,
Charlotte
