Advice to my 15 year old self.

In his brilliant essay on time travel, Tomorrow Rarely Knows, Chuck Klosterman discusses a question he likes to ask people when he is 5/8 drunk….“Let’s say you had the ability to make a very brief phone call into your own past. You are (somehow) given the opportunity to phone yourself as a teenager; in short, you will be able to communicate with the 15-year-old version of You. However, you will only get to talk to your former self for fifteen seconds. As such, there’s no way you will able to explain who you are, where or when you’re calling from, or what any of this lunacy is supposed to signify. You will only be able to give the younger version of yourself a fleeting, abstract message of unclear origin. What would you say to yourself during these fifteen seconds?”

Klosterman says that most people don’t know what to say. Men usually eventually say they would tell themselves things like, ‘go for it with Linda Thompson,’ while women eventually come up with things to tell themselves not to do, ‘don’t sleep with Jeff Mancher’. But at the end of the day, the question is slightly pointless. Without context, if 15 year old You got a phone call telling you not to sleep with Jeff Mancher….well, you’d probably hang up the phone, already rolling your eyes and telling your mom that she’s not funny.

That being said, even without the ability to give myself context, I know exactly what I would say to my fifteen-year-old self. A friend is someone who likes you.

I don’t have the restriction of 15 seconds here though. At 15, my life was a bit of a cross between Mean Girls, Thirteen, some movie where the main character thinks she’s some sort of saint/savior and writes in diaries all the time. My friends were all horribly insecure. And I thought it was my job to make everyone feel better about that. I spent a large chunk of my time trying to compliment all of my friends into feeling better about themselves and then feeling bad about myself when it didn’t work.

I know that here I could say that I would tell myself at 15 that I was awesome, that I had nothing to worry about, and that it wasn’t my job to fix my friends lives. But I would never tell myself that. At 15, I never would have believed any of that. I know for sure I wouldn’t have believed it, because when people did tell me that stuff I ignored them.

Instead, given more than 15 seconds, I’d tell myself what I learned about the nature of insecurity.

First, insecurity comes from within, not without. It can’t really be influenced by external factors. If I flunked a math quiz in high school, I would feel bad and start thinking I was not good at math. But then when I studied harder the next time and did well, I’d feel better. And I would start to think ‘hey, maybe I’m actually not too bad at this!’. That’s how people who are secure in themselves function. When my best friend flunked a math quiz, she’d feel awful and think she was an idiot. When she studied harder and did better the next time, she’d still feel terrible. She might tell me she got lucky, or that she was such an idiot for not studying that hard for every test. She was bad at math, and no matter what concrete evidence was provided to the contrary, she wasn’t going to change her mind.

There is a flip side to that though — insecure people are much more likely to believe bad things said about them, even with no evidence supporting them. When I was 15, a bunch of my friends told another friend that they thought I was either a lesbian or a complete prude because I had never given a blowjob before. Ignoring all of the general screwiness of that statement, I can remember that I responded to this by pretty much saying ‘well, I know that I’m neither a lesbian nor a prude, so you can kindly fuck off on that one’. My friend, who had never given a blowjob either, responded by lying, pretending she had given a blowjob, and worrying privately to me that she was a prude for the next 1.5 years because “it was just the one guy!”

As far as I can tell, being an insecure person is sort of like being at the extreme end of the political spectrum; you force the facts to fit your worldview. Attempting to compliment people out of it is about as effective as showing creationists geo-dated fossils. They’re just going to come back with a painting of humans and dinosaurs walking side by side.

Second, insecurity is inherently tied up with self-absorption. Cataloguing a list of all the things you hate about yourself for an hour is still sitting and thinking about yourself for an hour. Walking into a room and thinking that everyone is thinking something nasty about you requires thinking that everyone is thinking about you at all. When you don’t like yourself, then that self becomes one of the biggest things in your life. And it’s hard to have any type of functioning relationship with other people when all you can think about is how much you don’t like you.

When you are sitting there, cataloguing all of the things you don’t like about yourself, most people will tell you to start thinking positive to counteract it. If you can do that, that’s all well and good. But it’s hard. When I start to walk down that path, the path of not liking myself, I remind myself to stop being so self absorbed. And I try to think about other things, other people, other ideas. When I start to focus on everything else that goes on in my crazy, beautiful, full life, all the stuff that is not about me, well, things like pride and gratitude and warmth start to creep into my thoughts instead.

If you want to change how a person perceives themselves, or how you perceive yourself, you need to recognize both of these things.

That’s what I would say to myself if I had more than 15 seconds. I’d share every bit of wisdom about insecurity I had. But, if I did have 15 seconds, no question, I would tell myself that a friend is someone who likes you. A friend is someone who likes you even when you are disagreeing with the world view they set up for themselves. Even when you can’t make them feel better. Even when they are so stuck hating themselves that they can’t think of someone else. A friend is someone who likes you.