A Letter To Your Ten Year Old Self
Freeze. Stop right there. Stop what your doing for a minute because I need to tell you some important stuff. I’m not saying this to burden your ten year old mind, I just want you to pause your Little Mermaid cassette tape long enough to recognize and appreciate the fact that the biggest problem in your life at this very moment is that you couldn’t find the striped shorts that go with the sleeveless (yet, for some reason, hooded) top you’re wearing. That is your biggest problem. There is going to be a day in your distant future, a future you can’t even fathom because things like time and distance are only relevant when you’re speaking of movies and malls, when finding the pants that go with the top will be your smallest problem. A problem so tiny, yet so poisonous on top of all your big, actual problems, that it will send you right over the edge. The missing pants will directly result in your eating half a pan of brownies, which may sound exciting to you now, but in the distant future, it’s a whole other problem in and of itself, and is going to indirectly cause you to give the missing pants to GoodWill in six months. You know, after you find them.
I’m telling you to pause now though, because very soon, you’ll begin having real problems. Soon you’ll turn eleven. And when you’re eleven, things that used to just be inane details in your life will matter a lot. Your socks for example. You’ll go to school and suddenly it will matter what kind of socks you’re wearing. You’ll beg your parents for the cool kind your friends are wearing, but your parents are strong and sensible people who know better than to buy premium Nike brand sport socks for their gangly, nearsighted, pale child who has never enjoyed being active in her short, pale life.
Still, you’re going to fixate on those socks for the next four years.
The only thing that will momentarily distract you from your reasonably priced Kohl’s socks is the fact that when you turn twelve, you’ll get your period, and the elongated and overwhelming concept of time will crash down upon you. Up until now, your life has been a series of fifteen minute increments. Your problems last fifteen minutes. Your worries last fifteen minutes. The agonizing embarrassment of learning about puberty in a stuffy Catholic school classroom from a dated VHS tape that culminates in a graphic pancake uterus lesson will last fifteen minutes.
Then you’ll get your period for real. And you’ll realize: I am affected. This bullshit is going to affect me. Forever. In that moment in the bathroom, the first time you’re being pummeled by reality, when you have to break through the kid barrier and tiptoe into the kindred mother/daughter relationship that suddenly you realize is sacred, this is the first time you’re going to imagine the expanse of your life. You reach out and paint a foggy picture of your twenties, your thirties. You realize you’ll be your parents’ age someday. You realize that your uterus is not a mere pancake. Your uterus is real. And you’re going to have it for the rest of your life.
Things begin to have weight. You don’t want something just because you want it, you want it because everyone else wants it, or worse, everyone else has it. Ugh, the insurmountable, unending problem of everyone else having something. You look around and pretty soon, everyone has everything, and you’re at Old Navy at 8:30 on a school night, and your mom is pissed because she has all these real problems, and she’s been dealing with her uterus forever already, and there’s just nothing in the sale section that’s going to solve all your issues.
High school comes. One day, when you’re fourteen, you’ll be walking up the steps on your way to class and the boy you like will smack you on the butt with a tennis racket and playfully comment that you have a big booty. You will be shocked. SHOCKED. Because up until this very moment, you will have never considered the size or appearance of your own butt. You hardly gave it any consideration at all. Butts were a thing you laughed at sometimes, and didn’t care about otherwise. Before you even recover from battling that crashing wave, this same boy will see the shock on your face (because you haven’t yet learned to lie about your feelings, that comes in college,) and say, “Don’t worry, I like it.”
Not only do you have to consider your butt, you have to deal with the fact that other people are considering your butt too. After this moment, you will consider your butt every day until you are at least thirty. I can’t, at this point in time, speak with any authority past the age of thirty.
On the bright side, this is also the day you realize you should pay more attention to the back of your head when you’re doing your hair.
High school will continue and the butt issue will grow to be the butt and boob issue, which will then spread to you thighs, your stomach, your arms, your back, and the list will grow as different natural and environmental forces take turns affecting your body in ways that never cease to surprise you.
By the time high school is over, you’ll begin making catastrophic mistakes with your money. Money lessons are tricky because sometimes the consequences occur so far after the actions, you feel like the Universe is just shitting on you for fun. It’s not. Literally everything is your fault. You’ll be at Target and you’ll buy Nike socks and then your account will overdraft by forty cents, and then the bank will take thirty five dollars away from you and you will be positively indignant, and for only the slightest whisper of a moment, you’ll acknowledge that the Target brand socks cost a third the price of the Nike socks, but you’ll bury that acknowledgement deep, deep down, where you won’t find it until you’re twenty eight.
You’ll make these mistakes over and over and over because money lessons have no transitive properties. It’s how America runs.
In college, you’ll also learn how big the world is, and your relative unimportance. Sometimes you’ll lay awake thinking about it and you’ll cry. This is probably where your sleeping problems originate, but it’s probably also because of your diet and lack of exercise. You’ll wake up in the morning, bleary-eyed, late, and you won’t be able to find your pants. And it will send you right over the fucking edge.
College will end, and you’ll feel like you really accomplished something big. but then life is like, “lol, nope, you actually haven’t done anything yet.” You’ll start making decisions that will sometimes work out and sometimes not. You’ll meet people who teach you all kinds of stuff: how to treat others, how not to treat others, how to ask for what you want, how to love your body, how to laugh at yourself, and how to cry in front of people. You’ll start to look back at your choices and after decades of acutely understanding time, you’ll also start to understand distance, both physical and emotional. Sometimes it will make you sad, but sometimes it will make you feel free.
One day, your mind will wander to a moment when you’re ten years old, now, and you’ll realize you remember all the words to every song on that Little Mermaid cassette tape because you played it over and over, and you can remember the cheap plastic boombox you played it on. It had pink and yellow buttons and sat on a locked wooden chest between your bed and your sister’s. And suddenly time and distance swells and abates, like an accordion, and the moments that are sometimes so far away seem tangible again. Your problems, all of them, are both big and so, so small. And all at once, you’ll understand a little more about life.
