To You From The Future
To my ten-year-old self,
At this point, you’ve just moved into a new school. It’s already been a year and you’ve made a few close friends but there are still many kids in your grade that you don’t know. You’ve always been shy and timid, even now as I am writing, I know that that part of you will never change. You hang out with your friends from school, but don’t have any other ways to communicate with them after you get home besides MSN or inconveniently texting them from your flip phone. I know that social media is not a big part of your life right now but let me tell you it will become one of the most valued things ten years in the future. Although it hasn’t made much of a negative impact on our lives, but there are certain things I want you to be aware of and somehow change that for me.
You’re currently in fifth grade, which means that within this year, one of your closest friends will ask you whether you use Facebook. You’ve heard the word several times from your older brother and sister and saw them using it on our only desktop computer back home, right? But you could never wrap your head around why people use it or what it even does. Not long after you read this, that close friend of yours will help you set up an account at the school’s library computer. You will come home and ask your older brother to help set up a profile picture, which you just google searched a random image so at least you would have something. That, marks your first journey into the world of social media.
Now, that you’ve set up a Facebook account, you feel somewhat ‘in the trend’ and can engage with your friends from school. You share your Facebook accounts and you realized other people in your grade has more than 100 followers. You don’t know how that system works so you brushed it off and because you don’t usually post anything nor does your friend, you slowly start to use Facebook less and less. I’d like you to be prepared for how the number of followers you have will have an impact on your overall self-esteem and self-confidence especially during middle school and high school and until now that I am writing this letter to you. Considering our immature days as teenagers, how many followers you have will determine your ‘popularity’ at school and that is what you will use to measure your self-worth as a person. I was always afraid to talk to others thinking they didn’t want to talk to me, or why would they want to talk to me, I must seem like a weirdo to them.
Fast forward a little, Skype becomes the new hype. You’ll probably never hear about it until you start sixth or seventh grade. It is a good way of communication since it’ similar to MSN and you will use it to chat and talk with your soon to become your eight-years-and-still-counting best friend. However, there was a time in high school, around tenth grade, that I regret. You will come home to your best friend being pissed off and swearing at you on Skype for leaving school with your other best friend when she told you to wait. I understand that you’ll be equally mad since you’ll be in a hurry to get to an afterschool class and that you did tell her that you’ll be leaving early. However, I suggest you try your best to not retaliate to her words because you think that you’ll be more confident saying harsh things through Skype and not in person. Don’t engage in such act because mom will later find out how you cry alone in your room and blame your friend for hurting you. Even though it’s been almost ten years since I’ve been friends with her and we’ve both forgotten about that, mom never did and probably never will.
Smart phones will become a thing during middle school. You probably can’t understand what I am saying right now but you will understand when the time comes. You will get your first ‘iPhone’ in seventh grade and that is how you will start to become addicted to the Internet especially Youtube. You’ll become more aware of other’s lives on Facebook and compare it to how miserable your life is compared to theirs. I’d like you to have a strong mindset that people around you are with you because they love you the way you are. You don’t have to change the way you dress or pretend you do things just to have them posted on Facebook to impress others that might not even matter to you. You’ll only just waste your time. As cheesy as it sounds, it is true.
Maybe if you change the way you think right now, and not be easily swayed by other’s opinion, my life right now could have been so much different. I know you just can’t help being overly nice to people all the time but that is something I challenge you to change for your own good. Be confident of yourself and don’t let the numbers of likes or comments you get consume you because right now, the future you get easily stressed and anxious over why she’s not getting as much likes or followers… on a daily basis. It would be so much better if this isn’t what she thinks about every day because even if she doesn’t think she’s going through depression, it might lead to it one day if she still continues this path. Not only I would like you to do that for yourself, but also be sure to stay alert of others around you that I know will become so affected by social media that it changed them for the worse. The world will become more and more social media oriented with everyone concerned about how they present themselves online, but you don’t have to always follow the trend, right? I hope that you take this challenge I have given you and not make the same mistakes that I made.
Best of luck,
From you 10 years in the future
