Dear Teen Me: Authors Write Letters to Their Teen Selves (True Stories) (3 page)

Sean Beaudoin

Dear Teen Me,

Is it possible that this arty self-portrait was ever really me? When you close your eyes, you can almost smell the incense. This shot was taken before digital cameras existed. Back then film was expensive, complicated, and difficult to process. Remember when you got into buying old cameras at the Salvation Army and then sending away to someplace in New Jersey for obsolete types of film? It’s hard to tell if that was an inspired hobby or just the product of sheer, crushing boredom. In any case, this particular shot that I’m looking at now was taken with a 1950s Polaroid camera. (You paid three dollars for it and then ruined forty dollars’ worth of film learning how to use it.) Apparently, there’s a fine line between nerd-rock cover art and self-indulgent pretentiousness.

First, you found some “really cool lighting” in which to linger. Then you practiced getting just the right facial expression: anguished, hip, tough, and worldly (read: non-virginal). The absurdly heavy camera sat atop the tripod that you asked for (and actually got) for Christmas. There was a thumb switch at the end of a long cord that released the shutter.

Click. Flash.
Genius.

You laid the exposures out on the linoleum floor like a hand of solitaire, and for some reason you decided that this one was the best. How do I know? Because now it’s the only one left. How many drawers and shoe boxes and apartment closets has it sat at the bottom of? How many moves and fires and storage-space purges did it survive? In retrospect, this shot may not be the artistic breakthrough it once seemed, but there’s no question it epitomizes your guiding internal mantra that year:
Things Are So Very Difficult, But I Guess I’ll Deign to Persevere
.

Also, it echoes that old Depression-era truism that “nothing truly good ever happens unless it happens under light spilled through a dirty venetian blind.”

Teen Me, all I can say is that I miss you dearly. I miss your white teeth. Your “go ahead and dare me to cut it off” ponytail. The red Yukon suit you wore all winter as an anti-fashion fashion statement. Not to mention the vampiric
longing in your expression—an expression that seems to say, at one and the same time: “I want to create!” and “I want to be famous!” and “Do I look cool from this angle?” and “Deep down I know I’m a fraud.”

You may not have had a lot of self-confidence back then, but you did at least believe—truly and honestly—that art was everywhere (at least potentially): in a sculpture made out of tires, in a poem written on a napkin, in a black-and-white photograph of a dead bird, in a song written in an hour, or in a collage of supermodel heads torn from fashion magazines and glued to the cover of your never-opened Algebra II textbook. It was a liberating and exhilarating feeling to recognize that (lowercase) art was around every corner, just waiting to be made or discovered. Back then, everything was a tool, including (and especially) yourself: cameras, clay, pens, glue, crayons, your voice, or a guitar. The idea of
potential
practically swirled through the air—a cluster of insistent notes that made up the backbeat of almost everything connected with you at seventeen.

Teen Me, I would love to be you again, even for just an hour.

Because during that hour I would write the first fifteen chapters of a dystopian novel about a debutante vampire with a shopping addiction, bet heavily on the Super Bowl, pen an app that discourages people from using the word
app
in a sentence, and marry Natalie Portman.

And still have ten minutes to spare, just hanging out, you and me.

Plenty of time to knock out two or three more masterpieces.

Charles Benoit

Dear Teen Me,

Just dropping in to let you know that your little plan actually works. Sure, it seems crazy, and it doesn’t start off well at all, but overall you’ll be pleasantly surprised about how it turns out.

I’m stunned you ever came up with something like this in the first place. You certainly have reason enough to try—I mean,
something
has to happen—but we both know that “doing things” was never your specialty. But not doing things? In that respect you’re a pro. Not talking to girls, not watching what you eat, not caring how you look, not standing up for yourself, not trying in class—nobody does nothing better than you.

And that’s why the plan seems so impossible. I mean, it’s one thing to say you want to change your hair; it’s another thing entirely to say you’re going to change everything about yourself—the way you look, the way you dress, the way you talk, who you talk to, what you talk about, what you watch, what you listen to, and where you plan to go on Friday night. Everything. And you’ve given yourself two months to do it. That’s your plan, anyway: the ultimate makeover. If it works—and given your track record, you have no reason to think it will—you’ll start tenth grade as a whole new person. And if it fails, well, you’re used to that.

Granted, you have friends and you have a great (sometimes strange) family, but admit it: you aren’t happy. You can picture the guy you want to be. We’re not talking superpowers or sudden musical genius; all you want is to be the guy who
doesn’t
say something stupid every time he opens his mouth, the one who
doesn’t
get picked last for everything, who
doesn’t
let jocks push him around, and who
does
know what to say to girls. To put it simply, you just don’t want to be you anymore.

So you make a list. The cool of James Bond, the wit of Steve Martin, the quiet toughness of Bruce Lee. Then you write up a bunch of little plays—literally write them out—planning what you’ll say when you sit down at a table of hot girls, revising the lines till you know that they’ll work. You do this for every
possible situation, from the jocks in the back hall to the ninth-grade algebra teacher who you’ll have to face again soon. What, maybe twenty scripts or so?

Then it’s off to the mall for a new look, and then over to the music store to buy the albums you
really
want—mostly early punk stuff—and before you know it, school is back in session and it’s showtime!…

…where you proceed to get mocked and abused even worse than before.

But somehow you stick to the plan, and before long, it starts to get better. You gain confidence; people see that you’re funny (in a good way, for once). You start taking karate and you don’t embarrass yourself when you have to fight. And what do you know, by the end of the first quarter, you actually have a girlfriend. Your plan is so crazy that it actually works.

And you’re still at it today, constantly trying to improve yourself, to be better tomorrow than you were today. You don’t write out the scripts anymore—I can’t remember the last time you didn’t know what to say—and sometimes you even catch a beer with the guys who used to pick on you the most. Things changed because you made them change. Pretty impressive for a dork.