To My Younger Self

Dear Younger Me,

You've never gotten nearly the amount of credit you deserve in life. So allow me to give you your flowers now:

I want you to know that I’m so incredibly proud of you. You’re a beautiful soul and a testament of strength, resilience, courage, perseverance, and authenticity.

I know life wasn’t the kindest to you. From the beginning, the odds always seemed to be against you. You were born into a world that wasn’t built for people like you. A world that doesn’t value authenticity. A world that couldn’t give you the love and support you needed as a traumatized child. And that made life hard for you.

You faced so much loss and pain. More than many people face in their whole lives. You also often dealt with judgment from others. Everyone around you could never understand you or what you’d been through. You felt like everyone hated you for no reason.

All you wanted was for people to accept you as you were, and you couldn’t understand why no one could do that.

It was always painful and confusing to go through life with people regularly looking at you like you had five heads. You felt like a pariah, like you could never say or do anything without being looked down on. Everyone, even the adults around you who should've protected you, always thought you were just weird for no reason, and made you feel bad about it. So much so that you came to hate that beautiful weirdness of yours. And it breaks my heart that you felt that way.

Honestly, Edgar Allan Poe said it best:

“From childhood’s hour, I have not been

As others were. I have not seen

As others saw. I could not bring

My passions from a common spring.

From the same source I have not taken

My sorrow. I could not awaken

My heart to joy at the same tone.

And all I loved, I loved alone…”

That’s always been one of our favorite poems. Still is. Because it describes us so perfectly. (I think we should get a tattoo of it, but I digress.)

The point is, we were made different for a reason. We were never meant to fit in, or follow the status quo. We were made to help make the world a better place than it was when we got here.

From day one, you lived authentically and stayed true to yourself, even when it was hard. Even when people failed to understand. Even when they shamed you and put you down. Even though the world was always trying to make you be whatever it wanted you to be.

I want you to know now that all your efforts have been more than worth it.

Sometimes it’s hard to see how much progress you’ve made after you’ve been through so much. So I want to remind you of some things we’ve learned and accomplished:

- We made it to our 30s! We’re turning 31 soon, hard to believe!

- We lost weight, and we've been successfully keeping it off. But even more than that, we overcame our disordered eating habits. We don’t need food to cope with our feelings anymore!

- We did that epic boudoir shoot, and the confidence boost from that was unreal!

- We’re still doing classical singing, but we figured out that we’re good at other creative things too. We started trying writing, film acting, voice acting, scare acting (that was a fun one!), and even modeling. (Yes, the modeling industry has changed. Plenty of models these days look like actual people. It’s refreshing!)

- We got a lot better at socializing (that was a tough one, but we’ve come a long way from being that awkward kid).

- We’ve realized that we’re neurodivergent. I’m still not sure what exactly we’ve got (definitely ADHD at the very least), but even that’s enough for us to better understand how our brain works. It’s made life a lot easier to navigate.

- We’ve also realized we’re demisexual. Of course, leave it to us to be something obscure like that. But we’ve embraced it! And we speak on it often (Educating people about lesser known things and ideas has always been our thing).

- We still haven’t dated anyone yet, but even without dating we’ve learned so much about relationships and what we want in them (all those unhealthy relationships we witnessed over the years served as pretty strong examples).

- We’ve healed a ton from our past pain; we’re not living in survival mode anymore and we’ve learned how to heal in healthy ways.

- And we’ve embraced all our beautiful weirdness! We totally love it now! And I think you’ll be happy to know that we now have people in our life that appreciate our weirdness, and who love and accept us for who we are.

All in all, we’ve been doing what we were made to do: helping to kick that old world’s ass to the curb and create a new, better one.

And the best part? It’s all because of you.

None of this would’ve ever happened if it weren’t for you persevering. I know you wanted to give up on life so many times. Hell, you almost did. And it took you a long time to feel like you made the right choice by staying around. But I’m glad you did. I’m glad you kept living. You pushed through all that pain, all that hardship, and you made us strong. And I’m here now because of it.

I can’t say it enough, I’m so proud of you. And I’m grateful for you, and your strength, resilience, and unapologetic weirdness. I promise I’ll make sure the world knows of it and celebrates it. And I’ll always continue to nurture you and give you the love and support you deserve.

With lots of love and gratitude,

Older Me

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