Dear Teen Me: Authors Write Letters to Their Teen Selves (True Stories) (19 page)

Stacey Jay

Dear Teen Me,

In the past few years, you’ve dated more than your fair share of creeps, and attended more than your fair share of funerals, and the road will only get bumpier from here on out. You are the opposite of lucky, my girl, so it’s a good thing you have friends. Without them, you might not be around to write this letter.

You’re seventeen and you’re doing a LOT of dumb, dangerous things. Aside from drinking and drugging and driving your girlfriends to parties where you step over toothless addicts to get to the door, you have your own secret brand of crazy. You climb out on the roof and walk the ridge at night, letting your toes dangle off the edge. You have a stash of twenty-dollar bills under the ashtray in your car, and sometimes you get a few hundred miles into running away before you come back.

Sometimes you want to talk to an adult about how alienated and confused you feel, but you’re afraid your parents and teachers and church leaders will hate you. You have a wonderful family, a solid community, and people who support your artsy-fartsy tendencies and think you’ve got potential, kid. You don’t think you deserve to be so miserable.

But misery isn’t something you have to earn. Misery is misery. It just is. I know what’s going on inside of you, and…I wish I could say that you’re not seeing things clearly, and that the world will be shiny and wonderful when you’re grown up, but I can’t, because it won’t.

I can, however, offer hope.

In a few years, with the help of a liberal college staffed by amazing teachers, you’re going to realize it’s your society that’s sick and twisted, not you. You’re going to break free of the conditioning of your conservative, Southern Baptist childhood and declare yourself a feminist, an atheist (later an agnostic), and an independent. You’re going to stop starving yourself to be “pretty;” you’re going to teach yoga and volunteer and realize that parts of your spiritual upbringing were dead on—it
is
a blessing to serve others, and far better to give than to receive.

And the seeds for a self-destruction-free future are already being sown
right here, right now
, in the midst of all the craziness, and being protected by the most amazing support group you’ll ever have, a fierce gang of guardians you completely take for granted. Because surely everyone has friends like these. Friends who stand up for you and
to
you and call you on your bullshit. Friends who stay up late talking about religion, politics, love, pain, and what it means to be human. Friends who enjoy the good times together, and get each other through tough times, too. Friends who drink hard but love harder; who stand together and protect each other and refuse to ever leave a friend behind.

Your friends save your life every day. Not only by taking care of you when you do stupid things, but by letting you take care of them. They’re teaching you how to love and play and think for yourself. They’re teaching you that kinship isn’t only forged by blood. Slowly but surely, through the love they give, they’re making up for all the luck you lack.

But who needs luck when you have such very good friends?

Years will pass and you’ll fall out of touch with most of these girls, but you’ll never forget them, and you’ll wish every day that you could go back and give each one a tight hug and a big thank you.

So why don’t you go do that now? Tell them it’s from both of us.