The JCARN prompt this month is to write a letter to your 15-year-old self. Well.
It gets better.
This will be the mantra of your coming years. This will be what guides you, what gets you up in the morning and gets you to sleep, eventually, late at night. This will be the phrase you cut out of newspaper letters and paste on your walls in seven different places you call home. This will be the only thing you believe without empirical evidence, not because it is pleasant but because you have already seen the alternative, where it was worse, and that is no longer an option.
It gets better.
You will crawl out of the hell of the depression you live in now. You will eventually discover other ways to contain the fire inside you that has you tearing at yourself. You will learn to name your emotions, and you will learn that they cannot, must not, be excised. You will learn to budget, to cook, to clean. You will find yourself laughing from time to time. Between the drama, somehow, you will pass exams.
It gets better.
You will leave the shattered remnants of your teenage years and flee to a new city, where you will fall in love, and out of love, and in love again more permanently. You will discover talents, and interests, and the Cow Tower on the river bend. You will learn to think in systems as well as stories. You will not sleep, until eventually the nightmares recede. You will learn to eat. You will learn to work. You will learn that you are valuable and worthy of respect. You will sometimes believe it.
It gets better.
You will move. You will grow. You will find London and, within it, friends. You will make things – games, poems, stories. You will smile almost every day. You will no longer need to make lists of what is good in the world. You will know it in your bones. You will work well in a job that makes you happy. You will play well in a world that makes you happy. You will create muscles where once was skin and bone. You will still have bad days, but they will be rare and nowhere near as bad as they once were. You will fly half way around the world and a lorikeet will crash into your window.
But first, before it gets better, it gets worse.
You will decide there is no purpose, no future, nothing of worth to you, and you will try to destroy yourself. You will not succeed. You will see out the millennium with a glass of fake champagne in an NHS medium-security ward, a nurse at arm’s length. There will not be fireworks. You will get birthday cards from the other patients. You will punch walls until your fists bleed. You will lie on the carpet and not make your bed and only emerge from your room for coffee. You will not take your hat off for five months. But slowly, you will take your first steps toward believing what I now know to be true.
It gets better.
Oh. Mary. You are not alone. Thank you. I almost went down a similar path and chickened out.
Thank you, too. There are a lot more of us than is often obvious, I think.
Thanks for writing, Mary.
PS to 15-year old Mary:
Sorry the turn of the century will be so rough on you – but it will get better and you will go on to write some amazingly thought provoking, inspiring, witty and warm-hearted blog (yes it’s really a word now) posts – they will touch many people and help a few deal with their own demons – so not only will it get better, you will help to make it better (which is pretty much the best that any of us can do).
Enjoy 2014 when you get there – I’m sure it will be worth the wait.
H
PPS: Poor lorikeet 🙁