I know that at seventeen-years-old, you feel alone and hated by the world, but the worst thing about hating yourself is that the person that you used to be hurts the person that you will be someday. It’s such a vicious and natural cycle that needs to happen for you to change. So keep your head up, no matter how hard you gut yourself open, and after you open your mouth and more mistakes come out. It takes time to love yourself, but I promise you it’s worth the trouble. This I know.

Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it. Proverbs 4:23

I hope you stop spending all this time telling yourself that nobody will ever love you because it’s easier than admitting someone might. It’s easier to believe you need no one than to cherish the hope that someday you will need someone. It’s so much easier to have a soul in shatters – cracked, than to believe you’re more than a pretty china doll with all her pieces intact. It’s so much easier to guard your heart from the start than to let someone in who leaves it cracked. So you tell yourself that nobody will ever love you and you tell yourself it’s because you guard your heart with so much pain you’re unlovable. However, you are so lovable and someday someone will see that – I hope it’s you

I want you to know that I’m sorry. To my mind; I’m sorry for causing you to overthink constantly. For saturating your fields of knowledge with dangerous negative thoughts. For bullying you with words and questioning your sanity. To my heart; I’m sorry for bruising and blackening your core. For halting the flow of electric passion between your chambers, and for preventing your ability to attach to the strings of others. For fuelling your disappointment over and over again, yet you still exhaustingly pump and beat for me. This is what I want – apologies.

I know that you feel instances of loneliness. An instant where you are alone in a room full of loved ones – friends. You hate yourself for it – feeling alone because why should you be alone? When the people you love are right there. It isn’t fair. It isn’t fair to them and it isn’t fair to me. You know you aren’t alone for you have a roof over your head, food in your belly, and people who love you. However, there is a voice in your head who can’t see all that you have, it says you’re alone. You find it easier to be alone than to waste energy on friends who don’t love you. The voice always seems to be right. You just need to find a reason for it to be wrong, because you are loved. This I know.

I hope that you know that high school taught you that you don’t always have someone in your corner. You don’t always have someone who is going to be there for you, through thick and thin, because to them those words are defined differently from your own. You came to learn that happiness is not going to be what you imagined and it sure won’t be wrapped in a package with a bow. You have to work for it or else it won’t come. Most importantly, you must create your own happiness if you cannot find it. This has led to the belief that there are three types of people in the world: Those who wish to find happiness, those who wish to find love, and those who confuse the two. This I hope, comes true.

I want you to get this letter – or to find it ten years from now, and I hope that you’ve changed. I hope you are no longer shy and ignored but confident and loved. You deserve that. Every being whom walks this blessed Earth deserves to be confident and loved. There should be no need to make yourself small, as you have for the past eleven years when you roam the hallways, there should be no need to walk the other way when your friends seem to be immersed in a conversation that doesn’t involve you. I hope you have changed and grown into a beautiful woman who has the entire world at the end of a manicured fingertip. This is what I want – the best. 

All the love,

Victoria

 

When life looms over your head, threatening to squish you like a bug, you get scared and hide. Whether or not you hide or blossom, life still finds a way to drag you down into a cold dark place where hope ceases to exist, and when you are a seventeen-years-old girl stuck in a cold dark place all you want to do is hide. However, I choose not to hide but to stand tall and rise above it all. That’s what strength is. That’s what beauty is. I may not be above the darkness yet, but I will be. 

★★★

This is a letter that depicts the type of year that I have had this year. I hope to one day read it when I have grown past this period. All the love.