If I was given the chance to speak to the younger me,

…I would tell him, don’t be too hard on yourself.

In your fresh, young eyes the world will feel brand-new. There will be so many objects that will fascinate and hold your interest. As you age you will explore outside the confines of your home and find a world (a universe, even) that are not confined by walls, but is instead open and promising, and that are filled with things. Many things.

You will find places in books and movies that you will get lost in. You will get acquainted with sounds, and words, and the sounds of words, and how they all can be arranged so that they will create pleasing sensations in your ears — music.

You will find color, and you will find that there were more than the whites of your walls or the greens of your roof. There will be the reds and browns of the flowers and dead leaves, the deep violet of the night, the blues of the sky reflected by the rivers in their shimmer.

You don’t know this yet, but you will eventually accept that your whole existence will not be enough to be able to hold all of these things in. That’s not your fault.

You will then find that highways do not just magically end on the places you’ve been to. They go on, and they will seem infinite. You will travel further, riding open-window buses with the wind blowing on your hair. There will be excitement in seeing the irregular shapes of the mountains and the trees fade, replaced by the sharp angles and the unnatural symmetry of towers made of steel and glass.

Months and months of this and that feeling of excitement will also fade, and you will dread the long hours you will have to wait to get from place to place. That’s not your fault.

You will find that the world is huge, unimaginably huge… and that it is filled with people. Soon, days will come when you have to learn about the real nature of trust, and love, and how these natures relate to people outside of your family. You will meet cousins, new friends, classmates, and crushes.

***

Now, things — they are much easier to deal with. But the real meaning of growth you can only find in other people.

People seem easy at first, because people will always try to please you when you’re young. But come late high school, you will find difficulties.

First will be feelings of wanting to please other people. You will find someone to admire and look up to, and you will feel that you are indebted to them just for their existence. That they make you happy, and that they make each day more bearable — you will want to give something in return. You will not know how to start — this will not be taught in some classroom or seminar. That is not your fault.

So you will discover fear, and how it feels to be anxious. You will be able to define, then, what disappointment is, as you will feel it within yourself first — that you will be naturally driven into thinking that you will be letting down the person you look up to. Why? Because you want to please them, and you don’t know how.

Second, you will also come to think that all your life you have been nothing but a receiver, and an ungrateful one at that. You will sit for days, and months, and years, thinking that you are useless and all that you’re good for is taking and giving nothing back.

Third, this seemingly endless receiving will also produce a jarring, opposite reaction. See, you were getting all the care you need at home, without you asking for it. Why, then, does the girl in school never mind if you bite at your fingernails? Why do your classmates never stop you when you draw crude stick figures on your notebook instead of taking down notes?

Why don’t they care?

Through time, experiencing these over and over, you will feel useless and under-appreciated. You will despair as you end up trying to make people care. You will try a lot of things.

You will do what you can to get that feeling of approval from people, the one that you were so used to when you were young.

This will work for a time, but you will find that people’s attention fizzle quickly. They will give you a chance, and then leave after the magic has run out. You will feel bad when they become bored, so you try another thing, and another, and another until you get tired and rest. And then you try some more.

Years of this and you will come to realize that, still: all of the new people in the world does not seem to care much about what you do at all.

This is not your fault, but you will be confused anyway. Your mother and father promised that you were special. Your grandparents and guardians seem to think that you were, too. They repeated it, like a mantra, and now it’s branded on your mind, an irremovable tattoo. What is the world but a larger stage for people to witness your importance?

There will be no evidence leading to it, but you will think that you are secretly important anyway; maybe the people of the world are just too proud to show it.

So you forget about pleasing them, but become too conscious. You are, after all, special, and you feel like every action you do and every word you say will be carefully scrutinized by everyone around you. You will stop giving because people have become the ungrateful receivers now (which you once thought you were). You have been so generous with your gifts, and all you get was a passing nod and perhaps thirty seconds of clapping. They will give you the minimal amount of care necessary, to be polite.

You will come to hate people. It will be devastating to learn that after all that trying, it seems that there is nothing that you can do for them, and there is nothing that they can do for you.

***

Fortunately, you will not be able to end up hating everyone. No matter how hard you try, it is encoded in human nature that you will have to meet new people, apparently. So you do what you can. You will sift through these people and find consolation in the ones who will “understand” you.

It only takes one success for the snowball to begin. You will open up with one person, and find that they feel more or less the same way you do. This one person will introduce you to more people, who, after some painful getting-to-know-each-other phases, will make you realize that your feelings are not so different after all.

You will then come to the idea that perhaps not all people are that bad.

You will realize that they did not ignore you when you tried to please them; it’s just that they were trying to please someone else, too. They were not mind-readers to know that you were carrying the burden of wanting to thank them for their existence.

You were not useless at the time when you did nothing but receive — you were young. You were meant to be provided for early, to be guided, to be reprimanded when necessary.

It was ingrained in your head that you are special, and that you will do great things, but you’re not. Talking to more and more people, you will realize that they have been promised this false grandness, as well, and that all of you were driven into some kind of misguided entitlement.

You will soon see people in a new light. Not as furniture or decorations or objects in your world, not as new elements to figure out, not as new things and colors and music to play with. They are, simply, people. And, like you, came to discover many, many things in their process of growth. Some of these they valued, and others thrown away. Like you, they discovered that their existence is not enough to hold all of the things and the feelings they discovered outside their home. Like you, they were also only trying to find a way to navigate new people, and all the feelings and emotions and sensations that people present.

***

Don’t be too hard on yourself. You may not realize it now, but the largest cause of the heaviness will always be that either you give much credit to yourself, or you give too much credit to other people. Yes, there will be unfortunate incidents and natural calamities that will screw you over in various fractions of your life. But for the most part, a lot of the pain and suffering can be eased by learning your place in the world and understanding how that relates to other people. You must understand that people are not places where you assign a bank of emotions with. You do not simply swipe a card or press a button to make them do what you think they are supposed to do, to make them feel what they are supposed to feel. They are living, breathing people, with motivations and interests and dreams and wants and desires. They know guilt and fear and feel love and joy and anxiety as much as you do, and it is not their fault, nor yours, that these feelings do not always coincide.

This may all be a little too hard for you to understand right now, but you will, soon. Trust me, I know.

Forgive your own failings, and try to forgive the failings of others. Don’t be too hard on yourself. You will end up happier.