for you, for later

by karlie flood

for you 

for later 

a letter to my younger self 

I am hoping this reads like Dolly Alderton in Everything I Know About Love, like I am your Cool Older Sister who has Learned From Her Mistakes. But in reality, I am pretty sure I am just making the same mistakes over and over again, just in different styles and fonts and sizes.

I thought about the exact age that I wanted to write this to: myself as an anxious child whose “stomach hurt” before every big event? The angsty teenager in high school who thought sitting alone at lunch in a new school would be the lowest point of my life? (dear reader, it does not even make the top 10 list) My 23 year-old self who lost her best friend and sister overnight? 

I think I am writing to all of them. 

Because with every word I write, I am changing: I am somebody different than I was a minute ago when I wrote the sentence prior to this one. 

Of course, if this letter could reach my younger self, there are a million things I would tell her to do and say differently: 

Don’t take all your anger out on the people who love you, even though you’re 16 and the world feels like it’s against you. You matter the most but you don’t know that yet. You thought your worst fears could never come true–that was something that only happened to Other people, never to you. You will fall to the ground on an unusually cold November day and will find yourself humbled by your nativity. You will feel suffocated by loss, coming from all directions and fucking up every perspective. You continue anyway. You will live in fear that everyone else will be taken from you, too. You choose to love anyway. You write your favorite lyrics and deepest fears in journals written with pretty pens and keep scrapbooks of your favorite memories. You can feel time passing. You keep trying to grab it, and in trying to do that, you think you might be missing the magic.

You will dream bigger than you thought you could, and perceive more than you probably should. 

You will encounter thousands of choices you can make and actions you can take but you can’t do them all, and you will find that might be the catch of this whole thing. You don’t know how to disappoint people yet and you don’t know if you want to find out. You would rather hurt yourself instead of hurting them, and that’s kind, it really is, but you are wasting your time. You will experience break ups that will make you see everything and everyone in a different light. You will ask yourself if you are the one that keeps messing it up–the poison at the root of the tree; the broken one. You will ask yourself: must I have to watch every bad thing happen to me in slow motion, unable to stop it, and only prolong it? Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear, and you forget until you see it, that until danger is near.

You will decide one day that you feel most like yourself when you are writing poetry in your notes app, so you will start documenting your words in a project called Reminders To My Future Self during the first months of the pandemic. You didn’t last long in isolation and boredom. Created in part for memory, and part as therapy,  you created an online journal of your secret dreams and deepest fears. This will make you uncomfortable in a way you have never encountered before, but you will do it anyway. You will decide that your writing feels like it’s missing something, start painting and collaging backgrounds for your poems, and accidentally fall in love with art. 

You will become an artist. You will meet people from all over the world, like a writer in Rome who inspires you endlessly and reminds you to feel and feel and feel. She will become your Dolly, and one of your first true Internet Friends. All you will be able to say is that they were wrong when they said don’t talk to strangers on the internet. 

They were wrong about a lot of things.

Keep loving and learning and writing. Keep feeling and laughing and crying.

love,

me

Follow Karlie and support Karlie’s work at Reminders to Your Future Self.