Things I wish I could tell my younger self
1. You will become really bad at writing.
I am going to begin by telling you that at one point, you will love writing about your feelings. You will be good at it too. You will have a beautiful of way of conveying your thoughts, although those writings are only going to be for your own personal consumption. Through writing, you will know how to process your feelings.
However, at one point, you are going to stop. For several reasons. You will forget how to write nicely. You will forget about writing about your own feelings. One day, in law school, one of your teachers will tell you, albeit non-verbatim, that “there is a certain manner as to how one answers in law school, be it orally or in writing, and one day, you will realize that you will be incapable of writing creatively.” On another day, another teacher will tell you to reduce your thoughts into simple sentences. This is because she does not like long sentences. You will be scared of her. She will tell you how messy you are as a writer. She will only ever acknowledge your flaws.
But at one point, you will find yourself writing this piece. You still cannot write the same way you did before, and you will hardly make any sense... but you will still try, (and speaking in third person).
2. You should be more forgiving to yourself.
People are going to judge the heck out of you for some bad choices you will make. You will become self-conscious and feel like everyone’s watching. Your coping mechanism is going to be jumping ahead of everyone, and point out your flaws and mistakes before they do. You will try to be a people pleaser, hoping that people would stop judging you. But what this will do to you is that you will encase yourself in a blanket of self-loathing. You will not stop pleasing other people, but you will not stop hating yourself in the process, either, because you are now well aware of all of your flaws. Your worst critic is going to be yourself. And yourself is always going to be watching. Your anxiety is born. It will only get worse.
3. Brace yourself, a lot of things are going to make you cry.
Remember that one play where you had to cry a lot because of your role. So many people around you were such good actors that they could cry on demand. You couldn’t. Then, they told you to think of some really bad memories that have happened in your life... but the thing is, your life was so good back then, you couldn’t do so. The only thing that made you cry back then was a scolding from your mom and dad. And even that couldn’t make you cry on demand. Hence, you just pretended to make crying sounds. You did not know of any real pain back then. Years later, fate would introduce you to all kinds of pain you thought you would never come across. From then on, you will become such a cry baby. You will call yourself a weak shit. Your sadness will, at one point, become depression.
4. Love will be your saving grace.
One day, just when you thought your world was falling a part, love will come and be your saving grace and light. As imperfect as this love may be, it will always be true, and even though a lot of things are still not going the way you would hope them to, this love, this love will always understand and be there for you.
5. The universe will buy you some time.
You are going to be fed up about absolutely everything (except love). You are going to be overwhelmed by the amount of expectations people will have for you, but most of all, the ones you have for yourself. You will feel like you are in a hell hole. Anxiety and depression will become your unwanted companions. You just want to disappear. You just want everything to stop. You just want to rest. However, at one point, you will find yourself with some time because the universe, in all its glory, would have bought time for you, albeit in the most unideal circumstances. But still, you have time. And you will have some time to think and purge your emotions and write this piece.
But... for now, you are going to end here, because there are some thoughts you will still have to process.
You will also realize that this was a really bad way to end this post.
☽
