Letter to fifteen-year-old me

Dear fifteen-year-old Fern:

It has been a while since I’ve written. I’m sorry! I know it was at 15 when we realized that writing was special. That there was something about it that was helpful, and it allowed us to breathe. Just FYI, you’ll become more articulate about that feeling at 27. You’ll learn about the liberating qualities of writing. You’ll fear the terrifying qualities of it as well. But above all, you’ll figure out how to find the balance between fear and freedom, and you’ll realize that you are not searching for redemption anymore, but instead, you’ll be searching for peace.

I remember what you are going through at 15… I wish I could help you. I wish I could tell you that we’ll learn to be kind to ourselves, but sadly we’ll continue to create unrealistic expectations of the person that we think we are supposed to be…

I wish I could come back… Hug you when you start pushing people away. Lend you a shoulder when you hold the tears back. But most importantly, listen to you when you become so afraid of your words that’ll you stop writing… just like we did at 28...

We’ll continue to be our hardest critic, and for some unfathomable reason, we’ll add unnecessary pressure to ourselves. We’ll learn we are not responsible for many things, yet we’ll carry that weight on our shoulders as if it was ours to carry. Perhaps it’s our empathetic heart, or perhaps is the guilt we will accumulate in our teenage years, but somehow we’ll grow up to be a caretaker, someone that will put others before himself.

We’ll become incredibly resourceful. We’ll find things that many spend years looking for… We will be well under 30 when we’ll discover the secrets to inner peace: gratitude, humbleness, adaptability, the present moment, chips and salsa, among other things. We’ll make some wild dreams come true in the most unconventional ways… Somehow we’ll have that European bank account people on TV brag about; not in Switzerland, but it will be a European bank account nonetheless. We’ll learn to speak French, and in a very short amount of time. Don’t worry, we will still be convinced we do not speak it and will be super hard on ourselves that it is not good enough, but we’ll speak it, and people will tell us that we do. We’ll have friends all over the world, which will cause us to be very much in touch with our desire for culture and ethnicity. It will cause us to struggle with our identity, (that’s for another letter,) but we will create relationships with people that will fill our heart with love and gratitude. We’ll become a performer, a dancer, and choreographer… again, don’t worry, we’ll think we are not good enough; but somehow dance will allow you to live in Europe, France to be exact, and then it will take you to perform internationally, again in Europe. We’ll become a millionaire before 30, not the financial kind we said we wanted to be, but the special kind. The one that knows and learns skills that have no monetary value, the one that cultivates friendships that have no end, the one that people call “a supporter, reliable, loyal person…” The one that will learn that there is no “secret” to life, but rather paths to freedom and peace.

We’ll continue to be very mature for our age, and we’ll learn to be very aware of our flaws, which somehow it’s a good thing. Even though we’ll believe we have to do more, we’ll be doing just enough, and that will be the fight that we’ll have with ourselves for the rest of our lives… or at least way into our 20’s.

I tell you all these things because things will not change for us. We will simply learn to live with them. We’ll keep struggling with making decisions, because we will always be afraid that we are not good or capable enough. We will self-sabotage the things that are important to us. We’ll be stuck in a pattern where we do things to our smallest potential because somehow we’ll convince ourselves that we are not meant to succeed and that by half-assing things we will always be able to say, “at least I did not fully try,” so failure will become more bearable. We will fear the future because somehow we’ll convince ourselves that we need to know what the future looks like, even though we will be very aware that it does not exist. We’ll continue to think of life as a race, and we’ll think that there are checkpoints we need to accomplish because that’s what all of our friends around us are doing. We’ll lock ourselves in our room sometime and think of all the things that we are capable or want to do, but do nothing about it because we have found hundreds of reasons why those are great things, but we are not the one meant to do them. We’ll fixate on ideas that we would love or need to do, but we’ll struggle to get them done because we will help others before we help ourselves.

I do not mean to discourage you. I mean to tell you that there will be a lot of questions but not a lot of answers. I mean to tell you that you’ll learn to live with these demons, but that they will not disappear; you’ll simply find a balance between giving in to them and rising above them. You’ll enter a journey trying to become the best version of yourself, but sometimes you’ll fail because your desire for reassurance will betray you. You’ll learn to love yourself, which will teach you that loving yourself does not mean being perfect, but rather being gentle to your soul... You'll struggle with that, too.

I wish I could end this letter with some wisdom about what to do in your teenage years to avoid getting to where we are now. I wish I had more answers for you, and that this letter was different than me telling you all things that are wrong with us. But somehow, it will become our escape. It will allow us to be angry because we will find it incredibly hard to be angry with others, so it will be easier to be angry with ourselves. We will blame ourselves for the errors of others, and we will try our hardest to understand and sympathize with those that will hurt us. But, things will change, and that things that hurt you at 15, will no longer do at 28. Things will evolve, and things will change, and so will you, and every night before you fall asleep, you’ll think about all the things that you could’ve done differently that day. And that, I must say it again, will be our hardest challenge; learning to be kind and gentle with ourselves.

We’ll keep dreaming, however. And above all, we will never let our heart give up… We will find our way!