An unsent letter to my 22 year old self
Dear Michelle,
I know that right now you’re just 22 and a recent college grad who spends too much time locked in her room crying and applying to jobs endlessly- wondering what the point is in even personalizing cover letters. And I know that every moment you’re not scrolling through Indeed or Craigslist, you’re writing weird intros to poems and stories about suicidal ideation that you’ll never finish to try to transmute that shame of feeling deficient, but let me tell you a few things:
Over the next decade or so, you are going to have at least half a dozen different jobs. They’re all going to be in the field and demographic you respectively, never thought you’d go in nor work with. Yet from the moment after you interact with your first student and leave energized all the walk home- you’re going to understand why it took you so long to find something that gives you meaning.
And it’s not going to be easy initially – especially not in those days you make your transition into teaching. You will spend countless hours into lesson planning and come into work earlier and leave later, trying to prove why you deserve to be in front of twenty kids in a foreign country without a teaching degree or a visa. But it’s in those days in front of a classroom, especially on those Saturdays with eight back to back classes, where you will learn most of your life lessons on flexibility, empathy, and presence. It will be these very skills that actually prepare you to get a higher education the second time around.
But you are not going to meet the love you want. It will not happen by twenty nine, let alone by twenty seven. You will experience deep heartbreak and a few disappointments along the way as you begin to yourself up to finally letting someone in. And sometimes in the midst of some of these experiences, you will find yourself laughing between crying at the ironies of some of these failures. You will wonder if you got to rethink this whole vulnerability thing.
You don’t. Not every man will tell you this, in fact only one will, but it is that refreshing honesty and vulnerability that you bring that draws people to you, and leaves people respecting you, even if it is just in retrospect. So while you may not meet the kind of love you’re looking for- what you are going to have is experience- the valuable kind- that brings you closer to who you really are.
What you will know is deep, deep friendship and several other renditions of love and connection. You are going to fall in love platonically and laugh so much over the course of the next eight years. And it’s in these friendships, you will find most of your joys. Not all these friendships will last, in fact most of them won’t. You will write goodbye letters and make assurances only of life long friendships only to become likes on pictures and gratitude points on bullet journals.
This will break your heart, but in time you will understand that presence in real time is truly what matters. Not all chapters are meant to be read and not all histories have to be honored. Some stories are better lived and told just as they’re being written.
That being said, you will not always be a good friend, daughter, or sister. You are going to disappoint some people and be the villain in other people’s stories. You are going to forget to keep promises and answer messages. Sometimes willfully. You yourself won’t know why you’ve grown so distant and reticent. You will and are allowed to change.
In this quest to get to know yourself better in your twenties, you are going to peel back some layers. As you learn to be more comfortable in yourself and in your body, your mouth is going to get sharper and faster. Your own nerve will repeatedly surprise you. Some people will love the updated you, especially those who always noticed and rooted for you to cultivate your spunky spirit. Others will dislike your new found self- confidence and misread it for arrogance. They’ve got their own projections, sure, and their own relationships with pride/humility, but it is not your job nor place to convince people of their own realities or opinions. You are going to have to eventually get comfortable occasionally being misread, disliked, or looked over.
And the last thing, that anxiety, that restlessness, and sleep you never seem to get is not going anywhere. You are going to continue to be tired, anxious, and increasingly resentful that no one can see it nor have an answer for the fatigue that never seems to go away.
But it is not going to stop you. That very anxiety gnawing at you right now, the one that you fear and resent has kept you small, it’s not going to be what stops you. It is going to be what helps propel you.
It is going to be precisely that fear of staying small, that is going to lead you time and time again to push yourself beyond your self-limitations. It is going to be what leads you to move to a place with cities you can’t even pronounce and what is going to let you know when it’s time to stop indulging so much and come back home. It’s that anxiety that is going to motivate you to take leaps of faiths, make first moves, initiate difficult conversations, speak your mind, and fight for what you want. Even when it just leads to abrupt endings and falling on your face.
But these are not things for you to know now. This is where the beauty in the ambivalence of mystery and uncertainty lies. I know you’re really depressed right now Michy, and you can’t see all the life that lies ahead, but these doubts you have, just like those stories, are better lived rather than deconstructed.
And while I may not know what lies ahead of us in the next decade, and whether the next decade will even be a decade at all. If we will meet the same fortunes we’ve had up to now, later. Nor if the zest we feel right now, will be the same zest we have later. For now, the rest of your twenties awaits you.
La Absurda 