Dear Future Me,
I hope you’ve learned to give yourself a little more grace.
Right now, you’re juggling a lot — school, clubs, swim, friendships, and figuring out what the heck you want to do with your life. It’s messy and chaotic and sometimes a little overwhelming, but I hope you look back on this time and feel proud. I hope you remember the girl who showed up — even when she was tired, even when things felt uncertain.
I hope you’ve held on to your passions. Whether it’s writing, friends, prevention and advocacy work, helping others, or swim — I hope you didn’t let the “real world” talk you out of doing what you love. I hope you believe more in the power of speaking up, and that you’ve used it to create change in the spaces you’ve walked through.
I hope you still surround yourself with people who bring you peace, who support your growth, and who know how to make you laugh until you cry. I hope you know that you don’t have to appease everyone and keep people in your life out of obligation. And if there are people you had to let go of to become who you are now, I hope you did it with love and with clarity. Not everyone is meant to stay, and that’s okay.
I hope you’ve traveled. Gone places you have always wanted to go. I hope you’ve made memories that make you smile when no one’s looking, and that you’ve written down the good moments when they came.
I hope you’ve found strength in the setbacks. That you’ve failed at something and then surprised yourself by getting back up. I hope the things you have cried over that felt impossible, became things you realized weren’t so impossible after all.
I hope you never forget who you are — or who you were becoming when you wrote this.
And above all, I hope you’re happy. Really, truly, deeply happy. Not just in an Instagram, pose for the picture kind of way, but in a real way: in the life you’ve built, in the people around you, and in who you’ve become.
Love,
The You Who’s Still Figuring It Out