While I'm not much of a believer in the "what would you tell your younger self" mindset, I did want to participate in this week's Ladies of Hive prompt,
If you had the opportunity to offer guidance and wisdom to your younger self, what insights or recommendations would you share?
See, I think if I went back to my 17 year old self, say, and shared some things I know, I don't think it would've made an ounce of difference, because she wouldn't believe me. It's the same reason we mostly don't believe our parents or teachers when they try to steer us from a bad path.
Some things need to be experienced first-hand before you can own that knowledge.
17-year-old Honey.
The logic behind the question is that you being yourself might have a different effect, more convincing power on your younger self. Except it doesn't work like that. If I went back, as I am now, my 17-year-old self would intellectually accept that I am her, but she wouldn't experience me as her, thus rendering that logic moot.
So since I don't think it would matter much, I don't think I'd wanna actually go. I'm very grateful for all the hard things and that pain that shaped who I am now. I have to. I have a strong incentive to appreciate it, it being a core element in what made my myself.
That being said, I wanna play. Simply because when I read the question, a couple things immediately bubbled up. The sort I wish I'd known sooner. Would've saved a lot of head-butting.
1. What happens next is always up to you. See, I think my kid self got a lot of things intuitively. This is a slight modification on a quote I used to love at the time from the show Californication, that goes "All those things that weren't supposed to happen, they happened. What happens next is up to you.".
At 17, I guessed this to be true. However, I had to go through a few more roll-arounds until I knew it to be true in my core.
There's a great wisdom and a great power of survival and improvement in that quote, in that knowledge that you are always in charge of what happens next. Not everything that comes your way is gonna be good or helpful. Some bad shit will be visited on you, while other bad things, you'll visit upon yourself through the follies of youth, inexperience, lust, and the other usual suspects.
And this power isn't just in envisioning a better future. A lot of it comes from that "bad shit happened" knowledge. You grow a lot when you accept that yes, this really has happened. Wishing or pretending or fantasizing different won't change it. So the best thing you can possibly do for yourself is accept the very stark, often very unpleasant reality that it has happened, and it's not going away.
2. You can say 'no'. When I started dancing, I remember sitting in a circle and saying how much I love that here, I get to say 'no' when I don't want to be touched or danced with. To which a friend who I didn't know was a friend at the time said, shocked, you can't say no in your life outside here?
For a long time, I couldn't. I positioned myself in a state of inertia. I found it very hard to name my limits and my needs, for fear or rejection and abandonment. It led to a lot of less than ideal situations. That's ok, those were necessary to learn. What I do regret, in a sense, is the years I wasted thinking I wasn't worth standing up for.
The message you send yourself about yourself is of great value. And when you're reminding yourself you're not worth more by failing to say 'no' or create boundaries, you're putting out a damaging message.
3. You already know the answer. But don't make the mistake of thinking you know all the answers. You already know means that when bad shit's happening, your intuition is telling you, and has been for a while. Your body is acting up in one way or another.
And while popular opinion may disagree, yes, 'I've got a bad feeling about this' usually is good enough reason to change your situation.
It's great because these two concepts actually strengthen each other. The more you prove yourself, your reliability to yourself that if shit goes down, you'll have the strength to walk out of a bad situation, the more flexible you are in changing your ideas.
When my body warned me about certain people or situations, I didn't listen. What that told me was I wasn't very reliable to drag myself to safety. And that caused a death-grip on my already existing notions and ideas. Because I needed stability. Rigidity.
Now, I have a little more trust in myself that, if a situation isn't good, I'll know and have the strength to change that and protect myself. As such, I have more inane security and can afford to be more flexible, to entertain the possibility that sometimes I'm wrong or don't know enough about a certain situation.
Would my 17-year-old listen? Would she care? Probably not. She'd say 'fuck you for trying to tell me how things stand'. And she probably wouldn't be wrong.
