Dear Teen Me: Authors Write Letters to Their Teen Selves (True Stories) (9 page)

Tera Lynn Childs

Dear Teen Me,

You’ve always been a planner. From the time you first broke out the box of crayons to design an elaborate rabbit house—despite the fact that you didn’t even have a rabbit yet—to all the hours you spent in high school plotting out your college years, designing your dream house, and even just figuring out how you could get to college early so you’d be able to meet your favorite basketball player, you’ve kept the future squarely in your sights.

You’re always thinking ahead to the next step—and that’s great—but good planning also means planning in moderation. The future isn’t everything. Sometimes you sacrifice today by thinking about tomorrow. You need to slow down and spend some time in the moment, because there are a lot of things that you can’t plan for, and lots of problems that planning can’t solve….

Planning can’t keep you young.
You’ll only be a teenager once, and you should enjoy the fun and freedom of those years while you can. As you get older your body will start to miss those days. So enjoy them to the fullest, and make lots of great memories.

Planning won’t determine your career.
You will spend countless hours planning for potential careers. Among the many career paths you’ll consider are architect, lawyer, environmental biologist, marine biologist, teacher, actress, professional tennis player, theater designer, historic preservationist, veterinarian, and dozens of other ideas you won’t even remember twenty years from now. In the end, you’ll find your passion in something you never ever considered as a potential career plan. I won’t spoil the discovery by telling you what it is, but you’ll love it.

Planning can’t replace people or experiences.
Sometimes you get frustrated by your situation, and at other times you take the things in your life for granted. This is normal teenage angst, but on the great big scale of things, your life is pretty great. You have parents and an extended family who love you. You have great friends, a roof over your head, food on your table, and a car—embarrassing or not—to drive to school and wherever else you need to go.
It’s so easy to be dissatisfied with your life, to wish for and plan for better things, but take a moment to look at the things you already have. They’re pretty awesome.

So the next time you sit down to map your path out of town or to design your dream house, stop and look around. There are fun times to be had, friends and family to enjoy, and in the end your path in life will come as a complete surprise anyway. Think about the future as it comes up—when you’re applying to college or picking your class schedule for the school year—and then put it aside again. Take time to enjoy the present, because it will be gone before you know it.

Jessica Corra

Dear Teen Me,

She may have saved your life.

Big Bern—excuse me, Sister Bernard Agnes—isn’t the chatty type. Remember when she yelled at the entire football team? Seriously, she’s not to be messed with. The vice principal may be the school disciplinarian, but Big Bern is the one to fear.

She’s tall and broad and imposing and
no one
wants to get called to her office. You never thought you had any reason to worry, really, but all of a sudden at the end of your sophomore year, they call your name on the loudspeaker
.
And you have no idea why. You tremble a little as you sit down. You’ve talked with this woman before, because you’re a goody-two-shoes and she’s asked you to help with projects from time to time, so maybe that’s the reason. You don’t know of anything you could have made a mess of, but maybe you’ve forgotten something.

She lays it out for you: She heard you wanted to transfer to the public school, and she wants to ask you why. Shifting on the hard plastic chair to avoid the full force of her attention, you have to admit that you’re miserable at this tiny private school. High school was supposed to be a new leaf, but it never turned over. You’ve never felt like you fit in, and you sure don’t have any friends. In fact, outside of your time spent at the community theater with the public school kids, you’re pretty depressed. And even the theater isn’t going so well right now. You’re horrified to say this, and you’re not even sure why you do. But you tell her the truth.

You both sit in silence for a moment, but then Big Bern simply suggests that you go to the school library. That’s all she says: “Try the library.” She isn’t motherly, she isn’t sympathetic, but she is awfully insightful. You go to the library.

The library aides are bookworms and they welcome you immediately. You find your tribe there, and you stay put. This turns out to be a good thing, since you’ll be bullied out of the theater in a couple of months for dating the guy everyone else had a crush on. But by then, you’ll have made lifelong
friends—friends who are weird in a lot of the same ways that you are, who are into magic, and who have already discovered an essential lesson that you’ll soon learn: that life is what you make of it. And that goes for school, too (whichever school it may be).

It turns out that, despite appearances, you really
were
in trouble when you got called into the principal’s office. You couldn’t see it, but Big Bern could.

I don’t want to know what would’ve happened if she hadn’t pointed you in the right direction, if you’d ended up alone and lost in the public school when things tanked with your theatre friends. It’s not important. What
is
important is that you listened to someone and grabbed the lifeline you needed. Asking for help when you need it isn’t weakness; neither is accepting help when you don’t think you do. Don’t be afraid to do that, again and again.