A Letter to My Younger Self

A movie reel began to play in my head, scenes and snapshots littered across my brain and refused to be swept away. They insisted that I sit with them and see them through older, gentler eyes. I had come across a prompt to write a letter to my younger self. My brain startled me with its alacrity to dump out boxes of memories.

I am standing in the yard searching for the ambulance the morning my father suffered a heart attack. We could hear on my brother’s scanner that the ambulance had become lost on unfamiliar roads. I begged God to not let my father die, but I knew he was dead already. He was not quite 55, I was just 13. There was no acknowledgement at that time of the trauma that grief has on a family. The next four years were chaotic and confusing; my mother was restless and we moved frequently. One year I attended three different high schools, but I graduated at seventeen with a Senatorial college scholarship.

I had the standard English college class, we met once a week as a group and then individually with the professor to go over our writing assignment. I will never forget that first individual meeting, he excoriated my writing sample, and my younger self melted and fled. He called after me, I kept walking. I dropped the class.

I was only seventeen and lived off campus, I took the bus to college. During that first month at school I was stalked by a man who had asked me for directions. I have never been able to verbalize the actions he was doing, or his threats. I can still see his face and his vehicle 36 years later. I left school and came home. I forfeited the scholarship.

My younger self, my young, young self, I love you. I see now that we didn’t “drop” out of college, we used what coping skills we had at seventeen and we chose to go home. You kept yourself safe from the stalker who rang the phone, the stalker who would appear in the parking lot. My younger self, you didn’t fail. You didn’t allow yourself to feel at the time the terror of being watched, you took action. Now you and I can feel that terror together, and the anger, and we can let it go, he is weak and powerless.

We rocked those martial arts classes, perhaps no one understood why self defense was so important to us, but we knew. My favorite memory of martial arts? We took a hard hit, bright red blood blossomed and ran on our snow white uniform staining it with crimson badges of courage. And when we bowed to receive our red belt, strength and courage sang in our veins, we were empowered.

And that jackass of an English professor, the intellectual bully, the verbal bully who fed on demoralization and criticism? I believe he suffered the worst punishment, he had to live with himself. He too is weak and powerless. We came to that realization gazing out the kitchen window last week. We didn’t write again for over thirty years, it took burying that boy of ours to realize that nothing could ever hurt us as much as we had been hurt. We had nothing more to lose, and that was liberating.

Dear younger self, you did good. Yes, there were plenty of mistakes, but let us embrace, you are a part of me, and together we can gather the past and allow it to ascend to God. We begin anew today, at peace and integrated, unafraid of the future. You and I, we write for us now. We write because when we don’t our skin gets two sizes too tight and we crack. When we write, balance and peace come stealing into our heart. We breathe through unblocked channels of thought and memory. Unfettered, we stand with our face to the north wind, we are cleansed. Life and people run through our lives like water, we neither grasp or clench, but keep our hands open to allow freedom and movement.

Peace to you my younger self, peace and all good.