(no subject)
Dear Mary of Feb 5th, 2002:
Ten years from now you will still be incredibly fucking crazy, fat, fucked up about relationships, appalling with money. You won't have any babies and will feel a thousand times less ready to think about having them than you did just before turning 20.
You'll have some books out but they won't make you any money. Maybe that's okay, because even if they haven't been read by a lot of people, they've been read by some people who gained a lot from them. Knowing that there are people out there who have tattoos, who make art, who want to make up their own stories, who are still alive right now because of words you put together is the most astonishing feeling in the world. It feels even more amazing than the way you're feeling right now at the response to Pretty Good Year.
By the end of the next decade you'll have a bunch of postgrad qualifications that don't mean much, and a job you are constantly terrified of losing, and a mostly-finished armful of tattoos. You don't have the nose ring anymore, believing at 21 that you'd grown up too much for that sort of teenage nonsense. You were so much more grown up at 21 than you are at hours-away-from-30.
Your twenties are hard but there are good things in there too. I won't spoil any of the stuff that's in your future, suffice to say that you make some truly epic fuck-ups, go to some places so dark they will make your teen years look like a cakewalk, and lose some of the people you love most in the world.
And at the end of all of that, you're still here.
So I guess that's a start.
Here's hoping that the Mary of 2022 has her shit a little bit more worked out than either of us do.
You will spend the last hours of your twenties looking up pointy LARP shoes on eBay.
Sorry about that.
Love,
Your future self
Feb 5th, 2012
This entry was originally posted over here and has
comments at the moment.
Ten years from now you will still be incredibly fucking crazy, fat, fucked up about relationships, appalling with money. You won't have any babies and will feel a thousand times less ready to think about having them than you did just before turning 20.
You'll have some books out but they won't make you any money. Maybe that's okay, because even if they haven't been read by a lot of people, they've been read by some people who gained a lot from them. Knowing that there are people out there who have tattoos, who make art, who want to make up their own stories, who are still alive right now because of words you put together is the most astonishing feeling in the world. It feels even more amazing than the way you're feeling right now at the response to Pretty Good Year.
By the end of the next decade you'll have a bunch of postgrad qualifications that don't mean much, and a job you are constantly terrified of losing, and a mostly-finished armful of tattoos. You don't have the nose ring anymore, believing at 21 that you'd grown up too much for that sort of teenage nonsense. You were so much more grown up at 21 than you are at hours-away-from-30.
Your twenties are hard but there are good things in there too. I won't spoil any of the stuff that's in your future, suffice to say that you make some truly epic fuck-ups, go to some places so dark they will make your teen years look like a cakewalk, and lose some of the people you love most in the world.
And at the end of all of that, you're still here.
So I guess that's a start.
Here's hoping that the Mary of 2022 has her shit a little bit more worked out than either of us do.
You will spend the last hours of your twenties looking up pointy LARP shoes on eBay.
Sorry about that.
Love,
Your future self
Feb 5th, 2012
This entry was originally posted over here and has
comments at the moment.