Letter To Myself // 16

Hey guys!

Do you ever wish you could go back in time and give advice to your past self? Well, I do, so I decided that the next best thing would be to write my past self a letter, so I did!

Dear 16 year old Amy, 

So, hey! You managed to survive the tough times – the mornings of having panic attacks before you had to go to school, going out at weekends to see the few people who stuck by you and enjoyed your company, all the health problems and everything! I’m proud of you. 

I remember I found an old diary, a while back – I think I’ve thrown it away again now though – and it made me sad to see how upsetting and stressful everything seemed back then. You wrote endless entries about things that were upsetting you – from school to bullies to exams to hospital appointments – and, although there were a lot of happy things in them too – things like going to gigs to see your favourite band, and going to Camden with your best friends, and even small things like parties at J’s – it was overwhelmingly filled with sadness rather than happiness. I remember that part of my life so vividly, and it makes me upset to look back on it and remember feeling like that – worthless. 

I just wish I could have let you know that things do and will get better, younger Amy – you’ll go to college and make some amazing friends and memories, you’ll make the best friend you’ve always wanted, you’ll do things like dye your hair bright pink and get tattoos – you’ll get more piercings than just your lip, but then take them all out again. You’ll go on holiday again. You’ll be nerdy and sit at home playing games without feeling like people are judging you. You’ll eventually learn that sometimes, it’s better to be single than be wanting a boyfriend constantly, and you’ll also learn that sometimes, relationships look a lot better when other people are in them, and you’re just someone looking in from the outside. You’ll experience a lot of love, and hate. You’ll obviously still experience a lot of sadness – some so bad that your heart will ache and you’ll cry until you have no tears left and yet you’ll still continue – but you’ll also have moments of overwhelming happiness, coming along randomly and enveloping you in a cloud of the warm happy feelings. 

You’ll also remain the same in a lot of ways, over the years – I think no matter how old we get, we’re always going to be experimenting with our hair, getting crushes on guys we know we can’t have, spending too much time listening to music and procrastinating (kind of like when we used to sneak our iPod into school and listen to it during lessons when we had long hair, oops) and generally, you will always live on inside me with the cheekiness and innocence of being a teenager, and being curious about the world. 

Thank you, 16 year old Amy. I think we did good. 

From, present Amy.