On August 10, 2016, my therapist gave me a task - writing a letter to and from my 10-year-old self.
Later that evening, I sent this out to friends, “When your therapist gives you homework and part of it entails writing letters - one from your adult self to you as a child and vice versa…and you are sure neither have anything to say on the topic…but then an hour later your journal disagrees. So, I have to ask, sweet friends of mine, what do you wish you could say to your 10-year-old self then/or what would your 10-year-old self say to the adult you are today?”
Today, I am throwing this question out to the readers of this Substack.
For reference, here is what I wrote seven years later…
To My 10-Year-Old Self,
That imagination you used during recess will be lost. People won’t understand it, but you will travel all over the world and recover it. The right people will cherish this part of you.
God will send friends and mentors and mentees and surrogate parents, and you will know a more profound richness in relationships, including with God, than you can dream at ten years old with shattered relationships lying on the ground all around you.
You are awkward, intelligent, beautiful, and curious. Don’t stop loving people, writing or singing, asking questions, or seeking God and a higher meaning for life. Every part of you is essential.
Never stop forgiving people. It is important. Also, you are going to need more forgiveness for yourself from others than you can imagine right now.
I know it seems crazy, but when you are sixteen, you will get this thing called a passport and spend the rest of your life flying to all the places you are only reading about now.
Don’t let them give you a mullet the summer before your eighth-grade year. It is a horrific mistake, and you will miss your nearly waist-long locks (they will grow back out). Also, enjoy your bangs now because, at some strange point in life, they no longer fit your face.
Those skill sets you are learning and excelling at now due to trauma will take you higher and farther than you can imagine, but one day when you are older, you will pay someone to help you unyoke yourself from them so they can once again become gifting instead of vices.
Don’t burn all of your journals from that bad romantic relationship season. He was a douche, but there were some gems in there you will wish you had to reference when you start writing a book.
Oh yeah, and you are going to write. A. Lot. Words save you in your forties; we will see what they do for you in your fifties.
Love, Heather
This morning, as I work to juggle some rather lofty competing demands for my time, energy, and brain, I wonder if there is anything the woman sitting here today might add to that list. A list, I might add, that I wrote in the final weeks of my sabbatical one year ago. I mention that because one can imagine I came at that draft pretty relaxed and reflective.
Since returning from my sabbatical, I have spent the past year staring at a picture of “Young Heather” (me around age four) above my computer (as encouraged by my mentee and friend Katie), editing old words and writing new words, and desperately trying to follow her additional instructions, “…don’t write softballs. Write curveballs and hardballs. We can take it.”
I will confess that writing in complete honesty and transparency is sometimes complicated. I will further confess that sometimes I take a dive and don’t write the “hard balls” so as not to hurt someone or reveal how much I have been hurt or how much I have hurt others. I have been wrestling with that every single day for a year.
So maybe some things I would add to the list are…
Love and happiness trump every pain ever inflicted on you or inflicted by you. Remembering what has been done to you will simultaneously remind you of what you have done to yourself and others. This results in forgiveness being easier to offer and accept.
Apologies are more uncomplicated and quicker to express because the tit-for-tat that ruled too many of your childhood and adult relationships seems even sillier now after a year of peace.
Your person/prince charming/soulmate/champion is out there, but the road is more prolonged and arduous than you imagine. Patience is not a gift you were born with but will be a gift you are forced to cultivate in this area of your life.
You will meet people who know your lowest lows and highest highs and will still greet you and elevate you to others as if you have never known a moment of anything less than your very best, and you will be amazed and misty-eyed in both the moment and in the remembering because you know that encouragers are the gift of this life.
In the same breath, you will understand that being misunderstood and judged by even good people is the fate of every human being on earth. You are not immune from it, but you will find a way not to let it emotionally cripple you.
You will always feel every emotion deeply and acutely, but you will find people who can handle this part of you, so you feel less alone when they bubble up. Big love, big passion, big grief, big fill-in-the-blank. They will love all of you just as you are. In the meantime, you will write about it and fill baskets and tubs full of journals and legal pads.
Finally (at least for today as I imagine I will repeat this exercise again), you will lose people and places that poured into you, healed you, and/or loved you. Oh, the places you will go and the people you will meet. Life will be full of ebbs and flows like that. You are still not good with goodbyes, and I will not lie to you here and tell you that they get easier for you. They never do. But oh, how you love. You love bigger than you can imagine.
Let me tell you, I did not know I had all of that in me today. That is the lesson and gift of this exercise. Sometimes, it brings out something in you that you don’t even know needs to be said or written.
I encourage you to try it. Sit down with a pen and paper. Open up a blank document in Word on your computer. Jot down something inside your planner on today’s page. Open up the Notes app on your phone and type it up there.
Wherever you are, give yourself permission to write a letter to your 10-year-old self; if you have time, let your 10-year-old self write a letter to you. I was 45 years old when I first did this exercise and just a handful of months into therapy. I don’t have the bandwidth today to find and dig out my journal from back then, but I can tell you I remember the emotion behind it. It is powerful when we allow ourselves to remember who we were then. The irony is that it often helps us see ourselves more clearly today.
Love. Just love.
Author’s Note: I got a phone call after completing this essay, and to say that it challenged many of the words I had written a year ago and then added today, well, that would be the understatement of the decade. After that call, I needed to rant, whisper, question, and ultimately weep. People hurt us, often without meaning to. Other times, they hurt us in their quest to protect themselves. I know a little something about both of those postures, and I am not too proud to admit it. I proceeded to record the voiceover through tears and then sat here and pondered whether I could honestly publish this today, at this moment. Maybe let it sit, I thought. The truth is I do not believe in coincidences, and as such, I know in my heart that I wrote what I knew my future self (by less than 15 minutes) would need to read. I believe and mean every word, and I do wish I could tell my 10-year-old self all of this as it would have made her life easier - and made some things make a little more sense. Finally, I have squeezed a lot of life into my 53 years, yet I am still learning daily. Love, Heather
And don’t forget to remind that 10 year old girl how very strong she is. And for all the flaws of working for success, to be seen, the striving…. It got you through. You didn’t fall to addiction or self pity. Instead you rose. Rose from the ashes. That 10 year old little girl should never forget that.