A Letter to my 14 year old self
It was a rather unusual request my Mom brought home right before Christmas this year, a tape cassette player. Maybe someone in San Francisco saved one of these relics to play that epic mix tape they made for their bestie in eighth grade. I put the request on my Buy Nothing group on Facebook and received an outpouring of support. I originally reached out to someone who could convert it to a digital file and then our bubble buddies, who saw our plea, gave us a smallish modern boombox where we could record it to a CD. So here I am sitting in front of my mother curled up in her bed nook staring into this royal blue box to listen to my 14 year old self.
Let me backup a minute. At this pivotal point in my teen life my Dad, Steve had been battling colon cancer for three years and his time was coming to an end. Until now he put up a strong fight, continued to work as VP of a large mortgage firm and used his charm and humor to dissuade any ideas that this sickness would take him. But inside our home we saw the toll of the radiation and chemo and lived with the sometimes scary side effects of the steroids. He was a champion chess player and he brought the same control of movement to his move into the unknown.
And so my Mom pulled out the tape recorder that I had used during my childhood to send tapes to our family in New Orleans and suggested I tell my Dad all the things I wanted him to know before he died. We gave it to him on Father’s Day and he died on July 6th about two weeks later. I had never listened to the tape.
My Mom lost her home in the Tubbs fire a few years back and one of the few things that brought me to tears was thinking of the video tapes of my Dad and my childhood that had burned with it. The idea that we had him on video and that I could never introduce him to my children was like losing him all over again. Yet in the ashes of her home I found his ashes perfectly preserved in a ceramic water vase as if to remind me he is never far. I also managed to find her safety box key. It was in that box she found this tape which brings us back to this box staring right at me.
My voice is soft and more meek than I imagined it ever was. Calm, collected and emotional, I seem to form sentences that sound mature and thoughtful. I come on and off the tape many times having recorded it over a week or so and each time tell him how much he is loved. I continue with what a great Dad he was to me, raising me as his own and gifting me his quick wit and love of history. There are sections with inside jokes we shared, many of which I remember and some I do not, with nearly 30 years having passed. With innocence I thank him for things that have since become painful memories but I was operating with the knowledge of what came before not after.
It’s weird the way that works… the before and the after. The way a singular event makes a line across your life. It happens instantaneously when loved ones are stolen in a moment. I learned this a couple years ago when my birth father Rick passed after a tragic accident. But even with three years to comprehend my Dad’s decline from colon cancer, I was not prepared. It was a line that was slowly being drawn and while the preparation for his death came with time for such things as this tape, the accounting for the aftermath and grief was impossible to predict.
Listening to the tape, my mind wanders, hearing the naivety in my voice. I wanted to jump through the machine and tell this child so many things to prepare her for the next few years of brutal teenage life. In fact I have a daughter who is almost this age and while our circumstances are very different, she too has experienced a lot of loss in her short life. She soon will no doubt have difficulties moving from an extremely insulated catholic school to public high school in another year. So this isn’t for you Sophia but the advice holds true.
Dear Sweet Distraught Teenage Self-It will not get easier. Not for a very long time. But you will make it through this and the perspective you will gain will hand you the fortitude to TRUST your constitution. Knowing you can do hard things will make it easier to step towards them and therefore through them. While many adults still turn and run for the hills this experience will root you, knowing the strong winds of change will not bend your will.
I understand the growth from this is hard to comprehend when the world feels so glaringly unfair. It’s okay to be angry but be KIND to your mom. She will go to very dark places to become whole again and you should not take advantage of her numbness. It won’t matter how many things you do for attention, her space has nothing to do with you. She needs this time and you should hold her up. If not her loneliness will only be amplified by your selfish teenage bullshit.
Secondly be gentle with yourself. You did nothing to cause this heartache. Life is unfair. There is no amount of drugs that will fill the void. Alcohol will not deplete your anger. That the rage and emptiness cohabitate so forcefully is really difficult to hold but find a friend, a true friend and TALK. It is absolutely essential and paramount to moving forward. There will be a lot of fickle friends and that’s to be expected. There are few things more awful than teenage girls and you will be one of them too. Do not hold comments close from people you don’t respect. Befriend the ones who see you and make you better. This is true of dating as well.
Do not lose sight of who you are. You need not be anyone else. High school is four years of people telling you who you should be and trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. The best place to figure out who you are is to make the space where you don’t need to be anything else. It’s a hard space to find with many dead end turns but it’s never far from where you stand. And LISTEN to your voice. The one that talks to you when your eyes rest on your pillow at night. She knows where that space lives.
Take joy in the small things that present themselves each day… there is still so much beauty around you. Do not squander its power to heal you. There can be no light without the darkness. At this time an insurmountable amount of opportunity lays before you. This in and of itself is something to drive you forward. Because you CAN dream bigger than the obstacles holding you back.
There are a million more pieces of advice but if you follow your intuition it will serve you well. The irony of the phrase youth is wasted on the young is that it doesn’t make sense until you’re not young anymore. Don’t blow your chance to let your spirit SOAR by making excuses for the way things are. Allow the grief to fill you until the light is gone but when a glowing pinhole pierces the darkness allow your eyes to adjust and run like hell towards it.
Love, Melanie
I don’t know if I would’ve been able to absorb this loving advice at the time but I’m hopeful my daughter or your daughter or even yourself can see the hope at the end of the block. High school is always a beast of emotion and top that with any number of crosses kids bear these days and I know it can feel hopeless. Or even us adults have periods of enduring torture, like say 2020, with its massive amount of losses and disappointments. Our growing collective grief will be massive by the end of 2021 so embrace optimism when you can and move forward each day knowing it will not be easy but it will be worth it to go through it and not around it.
