Dear Younger Me

Dear Younger Me

Dear Twelve-Year-Old Me:

Don’t put Sun-In in your hair. It will create an ongoing cycle of peroxide and bleach that will only end when you move to Wisconsin sixteen years later and can’t find a hairdresser who will cut and highlight your hair for $50. But at least this time falls when roots are in (it’s called ombre).

Dear Thirteen-Year-Old Me:

Don’t watch the movie Clueless with your neighbor. It might be popular, but it’s just trash and will fill your malleable teenage head with gunk that will take a long time to extract.

Dear Fourteen-Year-Old Me:

1. Your eyebrows are there for a reason. Don’t pluck them into nonexistence.
2. Eyelash curler + blow-dryer = not a good combination.
3. You are short (or petite, if that makes you feel better). It’s okay. Wearing platform shoes with uniform skirts will not change that fact.
4. That glitter eye-shadow is a little over the top (*winces against the glare*).
5. Don’t wear ten bangle bracelets at once. Your principle will declare he can hear you walking down the hall from his office, and he will be right.
6. Oh, honey. Don’t like boys until you’re twenty. Seriously. Just don’t. They are cute but an entire waste of time, energy, chocolate ice-cream, and tears.
7. Your missions trip to Mexico will change your life. Hold on to that perspective shift.

Dear Fifteen-Year-Old Me:

1. Never choose boys over friends (see Dear Fourteen-Year-Old Me, 6.).
2. Invest more time in your family relationships than your friendships. Your family will always be with you. Most of your friends will only be with you for a season.
3. Try to establish better relationships with your earthly and heavenly fathers; they love you. This closeness will resolve so much through the next fifteen years.
4. Your parents want what’s best for you. They are just terrified that you are growing up too quickly. Don’t push them out. Communicate what’s going on inside your heart, and then they won’t feel compelled to read your diary/letters.
5. This is the summer you meet your husband! And though you like him, you like about every other boy who crosses your path. Why is this? What are you longing for? Intimacy? Connection? Security? Love? (See 3.)

Dear Sixteen-Year-Old Me:

1. Don’t order Rockzilla lobster (market price) on your first date with a hardworking tobacco farmer. That’s not considerate. Plus, you won’t be able to go go-carting afterwards because he will be out of money.
2. Never arrive at the county fair with one date and, while he’s parking his truck, start walking around with your high school crush. That’s mean and embarrassing.
3. Treat others how you’d like to be treated (um, 1. and 2.).
4. Just don’t date. Period. You’re wasting their time, yours, and giving away pieces of your heart to boys who (at this stage) don’t deserve it.
5. Be thankful for the godly mentors God has mercifully placed in your life. Don’t push them away for being too old-fashioned. Take their advice to heart.
6. Be grateful that boy called you a nun. There are worse things.
7. Do not play out actions according to what you’ve read or seen on the big screen. Your life is neither a book nor a movie.
8. Be grateful for God’s protection, even when you make stupid mistakes (like meeting that guy from the band when your parents told you not to), but at least you took your tough girlfriend along because you realized it wasn’t too smart.
9. Be grateful for that honest girlfriend, who tossed a note from her bunk-bed to yours one night at camp, and how that note was instrumental in nipping your teenage rebellion in the bud.
10. Don’t drive 80 in a 40 in your snazzy, ten-year-old Beretta with the monster sound system. This creates a police chase worthy of Cops, a three-hundred dollar fine, and a story that will still be told by your parents and older brother for years to come.
11. You might just want to sleep through sixteen (see 1. through 10.).

Dear Seventeen-Year-Old Me:

1. I’m glad you’ve given up “dating” and are just enjoying your senior year, “making memories”!
2. Taking your little brother on Pixar movie dates will be cherished memories. Do it more often.
3. Stay home with your family on weekends. Those weekends will change once you go to college.
4. Working in the orphanage in Colombia with the Petersheim family will be one of the best trips of your life. You will also have a “widow to your soul” moment, revealing that Mr. Petersheim will be your future husband, but you’re not ready to take a good look at Holy Matrimony just yet.

Dear Eighteen-Year-Old Me:

1. College!
2. How terrified you are! You’re going to do fine (besides Basic Math, bless your heart).
3. Never like a boy who asks to see if you’re hiding a big forehead behind your bangs. That’s just awkward.
4. Rethink the colored contacts.
5. And the purple heart-dangle glasses.
6. And the J-Lo blue jumpsuit with the white pin stripes.
7. And the disco sweater you wear to convocation.
8. And the Lucky bell bottom jeans.
9. Oh, honey. You’re happy to be out of a uniform, aren’t you?
10. Stop trying to conjure up a soulmate at college.
11. Write in Boswell Park every day of the week.
12. Go home with your roommate at least once. You aren’t going to miss much on campus.
13. Don’t eat your roommate’s entire jar of peanut butter and jelly over a weekend. That’s rude.
14. That train bridge is magic.
15. As is Cumberland Falls.
16. And the dorm room with your girlfriends Madison, Tarrah, and Charis.
17. Freshman year will be your favorite year of your entire college career. Soak it up.
18. Greece will be an adventure, which you’ll be grateful to survive (but what a story!).
19. You’re not a journalist as much as a novelist, and that, too, is okay.

Dear Nineteen-Year-Old Me:

1. A lot happens this year. Buckle up.
2. Go home for Christmas, not overseas.
3. Be with your best friend.
4. Cut your hair short in her honor when she starts chemo. Big gestures matter.
5. I’m glad you close your books and go out for Huddle House/Phase 10 marathons until 3 a.m. every time Madison asks.
6. Don’t let “boys” toy with your heart while they figure out where theirs is leading.
7. Be in a play for a semester. You won’t miss college cheerleading, but you will regret not trying out this experience.
8. Hug Madison goodbye before she leaves for her honeymoon.
9. Pour your grief, after her death, into your writing.
10. Your fiction/non-fiction class will just about save your life.
11. Forgive your family member. Love him where he’s at, not resenting him for where you want him to be.
12. You will hike to the Walls of Jericho with Mr. Petersheim, your special friend, in the rain and have an epiphany about love.

Dear Twenty-Year-Old Me:

1. You’ve been on this earth for two decades. Oh, my! Mr. Petersheim will talk you through this transition (or, rather, you will talk and he will listen) while beginning your long-distance relationship over the phone. Why, oh, why are you scared to leave your teenage years behind?!

Dear Twenty-One-Year-Old Me:

1. Take time to love your mom. She is terrified of losing you. Once you have girls, you will understand her fear.
2. Spend as much time as possible with your best friend.
3. This will be one bittersweet year as you transition out of college. Everything feels so familiar and so strange, like adult puberty.
4. Happy graduation!

Dear Twenty-Two-Year-Old Me:

1. Watching your best friend’s bone marrow transplant will be a transforming experience. Love her every step of the journey.
2. Maturity-wise, you really have no right getting married, but you do it anyway. Thankfully, your husband loves you while you figure it out.
3. You panic for a little while, believing you are going to work in a grocery store for the rest of your life and never write another word. But you will. Give yourself six months to breathe.
4. Your tired husband doesn’t like to walk around the track with you after work. That’s okay. Don’t be melodramatic. Assert a little independence and walk.
5. Cleaning the public bathroom is good for you. Put on your gloves and do it.
6. Your land will be restorative to your soul.

Dear Twenty-Three-Year-Old Me:

1. Attending the Southern Festival of Books with your wonderful best friend will be the highlight of your year!
2. You will make amazing connections from this.
3. Your husband supports you completely, agreeing that you should work part-time and write part-time.

Dear Twenty-Four-Year-Old Me:

1. Write that novel. Bake that granola. Find that rhythm.
2. I’m so glad you go to the UK with your best friend to celebrate her life.

Dear Twenty-Five-Year-Old Me:

1. You’re a mother! And terrified! (Rightly so.)
2. Rest assured in your maternal abilities.
3. Nursing is not a race.
4. Your child does not need fed around the clock.
5. Happy book contract with Tyndale!
6. Don’t push yourself too hard. Take time to be present as a wife/mother.
7. Maybe do one book contract at a time.
8. Sleep when you can, just like they say.
9. Ask for help when you need it.

Dear Twenty-Six-Year-Old Me:

1. Communicate with your family, even through the hard things.
2. Date your husband.
3. Don’t be afraid.
4. The Outcast becomes a bestseller!
5. Go outside, every day. Create, every day. Be present, every day.

Dear Twenty-Seven-Year-Old Me:

1. You lose a baby this year, but this will change your entire perspective on motherhood and make you adore your babies.
2. Your second daughter will bring such laughter into your home.
3. Hold fast to God’s promises.
4. The Midwife hits shelves!

Dear Twenty-Eight-Year-Old Me:

1. You move away from your dream home/land and your family this year.
2. Your husband goes through brain surgery while you’ve got a newborn and a toddler.
3. This pulls you and your husband together like never before.
4. Your time in Wisconsin is the most beautiful and trying of your life.
5. God makes Himself so real to you during this season.

Dear Twenty-Nine-Year-Old Me:

1. Your goal for this year is to love well, and you reach it.
2. Thanks, in part, to the strong, brave women of Wisconsin, and to the Father God’s revelation of His love for you, you finally become comfortable in your own skin.
3. Be grateful.
4. The Alliance is born.
5. Your husband moves you back to Tennessee because he knows you miss family (and grandparents to the girls!).
6. You love him so much for this.
7. Each day with your family is a gift.

Dear Thirty-Year-Old Me:

A new year is waiting.

What would you tell your younger you?