A letter to my younger self:

Love, you are going to grow up the hard way. You are going to string yourself up with optimism and fight for your idealism everyday until it destroys you over and over again. You are going to sing, and create and stretch yourself wide — to soak up the sun and dance around the world. And then you will be brought down like a falling plane, harpooned by your own demons.

You will hit the ground, lost in some jungle, with everything you built dead and broken all around you, stranded and alone, beating yourself up for the fall.

You will build projects with idealism and fear; without a drop of your true self in them. You will try to fix, and solve, and provide for absolutely everyone else, except yourself. You will see yourself as a resource for others to drink from.

You will spend your life searching, believing that you have a purpose on this planet. Believing that you are destined to fulfill some plan ordained by god. You will search so diligently that this is who you will become. A person searching, and never really anything else.

Your search will define you. It will consume you, it will become all that you have and all that you are.

I wish I could tell you to just sit down and dig into yourself. To take the time to learn all your parts, good and bad, and love them. To own them, accept them and make them yours. Rather than trying to change them, alter them and reject them.

Because as much as you’ve spent your life searching for ‘yourself’ and your ‘home’ — in equal parts, you’ve been running from yourself and rejecting reality.

I love you, and you’ve lost.

I love you, and you’ve failed and made many, many, mistakes.

I love you, and you have put yourself last, time and again, and you have suffered immensely at the hands of your own choices.

And I love you. I love you for failing. I love you for trying. I love you for your idealism, it’s beautiful. I love you for your anger at injustice. I love you for your intentions.