An old friend recently posted a picture on Facebook, which of course sent me down a rabbit hole of bittersweet nostalgia. I dug out my tub of high school memorabilia, which included an old manila envelope titled "Time Capsule." I remember that students at my high school put together time capsules in honor of the new millennium, and then received them back at their ten year reunions.
Inside the time capsule was a Teen magazine, some pictures from 1999 that had captions written on the backs, a class schedule, some notes on torn-out notebook paper that had clearly been passed in class, and a paper with a series of prompts aimed to help us capture some information that might be fun to look back on in the future--favorite movies, the cost of gas, best friends. On the back of the paper, I wrote a short note to my future self:
"Hey there! This is you from 10 years ago (whoa, that's weird). Anyway, I hope that everything is going well, and that you try to be a kid at every opportunity! Being 16 is fun, so I'm enjoying it to the fullest. You're only 27 once, so enjoy that like you did when you were 16, kay? Have fun!"Reading that made me want to retroactively knock on my sixteen-year-old self's bedroom door, offer her something chocolate, a huge hug, and a talk about how you can't fool your future self into believing that sixteen was all fun and games. At sixteen, you can fool yourself, though. You can tell yourself that sixteen is the pinnacle of life, or that it's the worst Hell you could ever possibly experience. Either way, you'd be wrong. I fooled myself into the former. It was too hard to peel back the layers of reality and stare my baggage in the face.
So I'm writing myself back, systematically addressing the bits of information I decided to supply for my future self at sixteen. I'm doing it as a Back-to-the-Futureish way of soothing my past to fully appreciate the life I have at thirty-four.
Dear Sixteen-Year-Old Me,
Instant Messenger is going to die. I'm sorry. You'll still use your original password occasionally because no one's guessed it yet, so why not? Also your brain has shrunk and unfortunately in certain networks, you have to come up with 180 unique passwords before you can recycle one. So you stick with what you know when you can.
No one asks a/s/l anymore. People are lying when they answer it anyway. Stay out of chat rooms, in general.
Mark McGwire is a sham. The Cubs will win the World Series eventually. The future is a scary place.
People will carry computers in their pockets in the future. They'll use them for everything from making phone calls to watching TV ("binge" watching a show for multiple hours is, like, socially acceptable) to organizing a protest to taking pictures of their genitals and sending them to other people. Thank God every single day that you do not have this device, and won't until your frontal lobe is fully developed.
Press "save" right away on that Chem paper in Microsoft Word. Save early, save often.
Try not to sweat it that you won't get your license until seventeen. It gives you a whole year to not accidentally back into someone's Saab, have to knock on their door to tell them, and pay them a few Dierberg's bakery paychecks' worth of cash to replace their damaged headlight. You don't have to tell your dad. I won't either.
Good on you for not getting drunk at this age. But, stop being an asshole to friends who do. They're figuring things out, and probably the best thing you can do to protect these friendships is to get off your high (that is, sober) horse. They're good people.
Your body is beautiful. It will continue to change as you age, and trust me, you love your sixteen year old body. Wear the bikini! You'll work really hard in the future to love your body at all of its various stages.
Take some time to get to know people of other races and cultures. There's a lot you don't know.
Ask Grandma how she felt parenting newborn babies, boys, sensitive kids, smart kids, rebels. Ask her if she ever felt anxious. Ask her to share some of her writing with you. Ask her, write it down, keep it sacred. She'll be gone this year.
Log on to AOL and do some initial learning about anxiety and depression. Ask someone to help you with it, and don't feel like that means there's something wrong with you. You don't know it yet, but you don't have to be viewing the world the way you do right now.
Right now, you think that your worth has something to do with who likes you and who doesn't, which boys are looking at you, or calling you, or wanting to take you to a dance. Rejection hurts. Yes, that one boy really does like that girl more than you. It will happen many more times. It's an ego bruise, for sure. But that's all--you're still loved by many more important people. You're enough, even without a boy attached to you. You have some girls in your life right now who will work tirelessly to help you understand your worth well into your thirties and beyond. Put your focus there--on that friendship with people who love you. It's gold.
But since there's no way I'll be able to completely turn you away from boys, that guy you're going on dates with? Literally the least significant romantic interest of the whole lineup. He's going to be a tiny, microscopic blip in the scheme of your life. He's going to be a jackass, and then there will be a few other jackasses after that, and then some genuinely good guys who don't fit, and then your husband. But don't necessarily go avoiding the jackasses and ill-fitters. They are a perfect road map along which you will mold and define what you're looking for in an ideal partner. And you will end up with your ideal partner. Right now, as you write this letter to me, your future husband is living less than two miles away from you. You already know him, actually. Don't get excited--it's not time yet.
Divorce sucks, and there's no easy way to navigate blending two families together. I'm going to do you a favor right now: This is not your fault. You are a child. You're trying to sort through some feelings that just don't go away on their own, nor are you able to view your family life through an objective lens. Do not allow yourself to believe for one more second that you are the reason your family is in turmoil. Be patient with you, and be patient with the family. It will get much, much better in the future. Just don't carry this burden alone. Everyone in your house is hurting.
Sixteen clearly feels like a party, based on your advice to your future self to enjoy my late twenties like I enjoyed sixteen. But I remember the truth. You spent hundreds of minutes waiting to the tune of squeaky alien noises while your dial-up internet connected, and you waited with equal agonizing patience for your next opportunity to escape the parts of life that didn't make sense. You were on a quest that necessarily included mistakes and lessons learned the hard way. Learn to embrace the baggage, because it's what you carry that makes you beautiful. Luckily the burden you carry will change over time--sometimes it'll shrink to fit in the palm of your hand, and other times, it'll threaten to smash you like a pancake. Don't feel sad that you have it. Don't ignore it.
The point is, you will find the people that will carry it with you. I know, because I can say confidently that at thirty-four, it gets better.
;-) (sideways winking smiley face),
Future You
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