Dear 14 year old Chloe,
Happy Birthday. Have a wonderful day. See you in six years, where I would like to tell you that you will be living in an exotic land, chasing dreams with a gorgeous boy holding your hand, succeeding academically, loving your life and grabbing every single chance with (a little bit too much) intense devotion to being happy.
You have no idea how much more complicated life will get. Don’t feel patronised, no one expects you to understand. In fact, you should embrace the fact that you don’t, and probably can’t. Life is huge. You are huge. Continue. So much can happen. So much will happen. I can’t tell you how best to deal with it and you wouldn’t listen anyway. There are no messages you can leave yourself that will make a remote difference to how you will deal with a situation or emotion that will make a blind bit of difference to any of it. Just feel what you feel when you feel it and never be ashamed.
You will never truly or fully appreciate how beautiful anything is until it’s over or gone. But try. Don’t get annoyed with yourself when you fail: it’s ok to be sad sometimes. No one ‘expects’ anything else.
There will always be idiots in your life. There will always be idiots in the world: you can’t expect to get on with everyone and you can’t expect everyone to get along with you. It is hard, and it is upsetting. Know that they don’t have to have a huge impact on how you regard yourself. You have family and you have friends who love you the way they are. And if sometimes you feel otherwise, maybe sometimes you feel alone, just hang on. Hang on and remember: you have a lifetime’s worth of friends out there. So many people will pass in and out of your life, and you always have the opportunity to grab onto the ones who you feel will enrich it. And there will be plenty.
Life carries on after school. Don’t tell anyone I said this but: (it’s not such a big deal.). Life gets bigger. I think life is getting better. Every birthday I have had so far, I think to myself: “That was the best year of my life.”.
Know that your motivation gives you the fuel you need to follow your ideas, intentions and dreams across through to the next ones: and these journeys are made by you. You can chose to let who shares it with you in most respects. You chose the paths you take. You are making this. Credit yourself.
That’s a bit of a joke coming from me.
You will say ‘I love you’ to five different men by the age of 20. By the age of 20, you will only really be sure about one of them, and that might just be because of a chord you just heard a few hours ago....No, this doesn’t get easier. Yes, it does get better.
You owe your family everything. Get to know your grandparents. Get to know your uncle. Immerse yourself in your family. Let them know what they mean to you: never let this pass them by.
By the end of this year, you will have a boyfriend. So stop worrying. (Because we both know that that's all you're really worried about.)
Love you,
20 year old Chloe x
NB this may have been recycled from when I wrote it a few years ago...
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