Hell's Half Acre

The lovely Sherrie tagged me for a meme. You can read about it over at her blog. I like being a dead-end of memes, so I'm not going to bother tagging anyone. If anyone reading would like to do it, then go right ahead. The demand is to write a letter to yourself when you were 13, as if you could send letters backward in time. Back when I was 13, I wrote a letter to myself at 23, because time only moves forward, so, here is my response (some years late).


Hello Myself,

I've tried to figure it out, and I'm pretty sure you must be in Grade 7. You have reached your full height, just so you know, but it'll take a couple of years for your friends to catch up with you. Enjoy being the tallest for a bit - you are already the oldest and it only adds to your overdeveloped sense of superiority.

I know it sucks that Michael is leaving for university, but it's not the end of the world. Emily is going to skip a grade and join him shortly, and then it'll just be you and Susan, and it will actually be kind of nice (if not a little boring) to have the house to yourselves. Susan doesn't think any less of you for watching kids shows, so enjoy them. You'll be watching a lot of TV actually, because it's how you deal with stress...and yeah, things aren't necessarily going to get any better for you for a long time, but they aren't going to get any worse either.

High School is super boring, but you meet a couple of cool people there and you have some good laughs. I could advise you to learn French, but I know you won't. It's true, I wish I knew it now, but you are quite correct that it will only bring down your average and those scholarships come in pretty handy when you finally get to go to university. University is worth the wait.

Learning German reaps far more rewards than learning French, don't let anyone tell you otherwise - they quite often don't know what is important in life. It's better to learn French when you want to.

I'm not one to have regrets, so I'm not going to tell you to do anything differently. There are some sucky points, some things that for a brief moment you'll think "well, I should have done that differently," but if you do everything perfect the first time, you never learn. I like who you become and for that reason alone, I'm letting you make your mistakes.

No, you do not have a boyfriend. You will not have one (not really anyway) for the next 13 years at least (who knows what the future holds).  This isn't as bad as it sounds, and this does not mean what you think it does.

My only advice is to try to have more self-esteem. I know you are probably thinking "what crack are you smoking?" because you have self-esteem in spades. You are awesome and you know it. The people who matter in your life will know it too. You never listen when people tell you otherwise, you are fantastic at blocking out other people's criticisms. You are, however, your own worst critic, and you seem to have a harsher self-critic than most everyone else in the world. You quit things all the time, because you think you aren't very good at them. You are. I don't know where these judgments come from. Maybe you are too easily frustrated. I don't know...try to stick with things. You secretly do care what other people think, but you make up what they think before they have a chance to. The truth is that people aren't as mean as you are to yourself.

There is one thing you never quit working on and become quite excellent at and that (cheese-ily) is love. True, it is not a marketable skill, and you are unemployed at 26 wondering why everything you are good at is not stuff you can put on a resume. It's worth it nonetheless. You tell people you are unlucky in love, in order to explain the lack of boyfriends, but it's not true. You are very lucky in love. Love is what you work hardest at and never quit. It's not love in the traditional sense though, not love as you know it now. Because of this, hardly anyone will understand you or your relationships. Love changes you, but not in a way that anyone on the outside will notice. You like the changes.

I wish I had advice for stocks, but I still don't pay attention to that sort of thing. Like I said, I'm not one for regrets and I like the person you become.

Sincerely,
Alix