Letter to Fourteen Year Old Me

Dear Me,

Oh, dear me, dear me, sounds like I'm wringing my hands. You're thirty four now. Seems hard for a fourteen year old to imagine, I'm sure, her life twenty years gone.

I'm jealous of you, the fourteen year old me, nostalgic for you. All of your boyfriends and various states of undress with your boyfriends are approaching, and I remember the idea of first love and horny sex but that's all it is, an idea. I don't have the energy these days to relive it. I envy you those times, but not the heartbreak. I say there is nothing I can do to save you from that pain, nor would I want to. You got your heart broken many times, but it led you to the man you are married to today. You have pilot projects, test cases, comparison studies ahead of you. I don't advocate hesitation or caution when it comes to love.

If I could infuse you with confidence in middle school and high school, I would.

You are still a writer, you'd be pleased to know that. Ramblings and poems and navel-gazing stuff and trying to make sense of the world, and some of our stuff is published.

The things you remember are not the classes, or the college classes, or the jobs. The strongest memories are being outside in nature with the ones you love. Your best memories are the times you don't get credit for, where you are merely enjoying yourself.

Your only regrets are the way you have treated people. At some point in the next twenty years sarcasm will become a crutch, and you'll spend years disentangling yourself from it and forcing yourself to speak openly, and see the world openly.

You do live in a city, even though you never thought you would. But you take your son fishing and camping. Your children pretty much rock. But don't worry about that yet. Enjoy just you for a while.

You gained a bewildering confidence somewhere along the way.

Try again to get into that creative writing class in college. Go on those trips, goof off, lay in the sunshine more.

The best things that happen to you are other people. Be open to them.

And put some sunscreen on your face, because we get skin cancer at 25, at a time we don't have health insurance, for God's sake.

And just be prepared: the only constant is change.

My sister has begun a women's group, to talk about those things that are extremely important to talk about but are shunned in mainstream culture, or ridiculed, or forgotten. Women's lives are intricate and not just for Oprah magazine. One of the group members had a suggestion: "It is an idea for women to contemplate their life journey, and to write yourself a letter. The letter is from the person you are now, to the person you were 10 or 20 years ago, telling yourself what you would like to say to your younger self, to spare yourself pain or to help yourself on the way if you could have... Here are very poignant examples to inpsire you.think I will do this activity-http://www.oprah.com/spirit/Letters-to-My-Younger-Self-Trisha-Yearwood-Barbara-Boxer/1"