A Letter to My Younger Self on the Occasion of My Fortieth Birthday
You will waste your time, but not how you expect to. There will be lazy weekend mornings that turn into pajamaed-afternoons of reading in bed and googling true crime cases that remain unsolved. There will be evenings right after work, when you’ve already packed your gym clothes and it’s time to go, but instead you will go home and sit on your ass and order Chinese food and read a book that is widely known as a “guilty pleasure.” There will be nights when you get all dressed up, play your pre-game going out music, go to the party, and then not talk to a soul. You’ll go home and look at photos of dogs dressed in costumes on the internet until it’s nearly daylight. There will be times when you try to concentrate — try to write, try to think, try to meditate — and all you’ll be able to do is stare at the wall while Liz Phair song lyrics swirl through your head.
There will be a Saturday morning when you and a friend go to the multiplex and pay to see a movie and then you will sneak into two more after that. It will be dark by the time you get out and you will be giggly even though you have missed so much sunshine and run none of your errands. You will have long, impassioned debates about minor pop culture figures as if you were a character in a Tarantino film. You will watch all of Laguna Beach and all of the reality TV shows it spawns, and you will feel like you have intimate knowledge of these well-lighted people, and you will think about all of the books you could have read instead.
These are the good times, of course. You won’t recognize them as such. Hell is always the moment you’re in.
You will stand in front of the mirror trying to figure out how you can change your body or the clothes you’re wearing so that the person staring back at you doesn’t seem so unappealing. You will cry in front of that goddamn mirror because change is hard, and you’re not quite sure you’ll ever get there. You will stand there and hate yourself, and then you will hate yourself for hating yourself. Things will get too meta, too soon. You will be late to the event you were getting ready for. This will happen more than once.
You will stay in the wrong jobs for way too long. You will give yourself pep talks about your grit and sheer determination to get through the day which you will deliver from the safety of a locked bathroom stall. You will be mistreated and undervalued but you will hang onto your health insurance for as long as you can. You will start to “put out feelers” when that one colleague accidentally-but-on-purpose falls directly into your breasts. Eventually you will find a new job, but it will take a long time.
You will have a friend that seeks your support and attention often. You will be there for her with wine and sympathy and and plenty of shit-talking every time she makes terrible decisions in her love life (often). After all, you will think, who among us? She will talk and talk and talk and you will let her. You will give her advice that she will ignore, but it’s not like your advice would really matter anyway. She won’t ask how you’re doing. She will start to figure out her life, and she will start to ignore your emails and texts.
You will love the wrong person. He will drain you of ambition, of confidence, of vision. It will take an unbearable amount of time to recover.
You will think too much. You will have cycles of grief in which you play and replay the worst scenes over and over on a seemingly endless loop. The what-ifs will play out like multiverses in your brain: if you had said something different, if you had kept a better handle on your emotions, if you had left a little bit earlier in the night. You will make up speeches in your head and deliver them in dreams. You will write letters and emails that go unsent, and diary entries that are so melodramatic that someday when you are on proper medication for OCD, they will make you laugh because what else can you do?
You will goof off on social media. A lot. You will fight with trolls and you will be inundated with bad news and stupidity and injustice all the time. There will be hours and hours of mindless scrolling. But you will also meet friends online, find career advice, and even find love there. You will interact with people whose life experience are entirely different from your own, and you will learn from them. They will help you to see the world outside of the dramas you create for yourself, and they will make you want to make it better. You will forever be entertained by dogs-in-costumes content, and you will take your time to appreciate them. You will spend hours creating a slideshow of otters that look like Mad Men characters. Worth it? Oh, yes.
You will look back on the time you’ve wasted, and you will realize that with all the hours you’ve spent obsessing over your body or obsessing over some man or obsessing in general, you could have become a multilingual neurosurgeon and rocket scientist. You could’ve written a dozen novels. You could have run marathons. You have not. Of course you have not, stop being so hard on yourself and go get a glass of wine. You have TV to watch.
A Letter to My Younger Self on the Occasion of My Fortieth Birthday
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