Letter to Myself at Age 18

Thanks to Shamelessly Sassy for the inspiration for this post. I hadn’t thought about this in years. I know my oldest child doesn’t think I know what it’s like to be 18, but I do. I don’t know what it’s like to be young in her world, it’s true. But I remember mine. It’s not easy to have little personal power, to be unable to easily articulate what’s wrong, and to not have enough depth of perspective yet to see where you’re contributing to your own pain. It gets better, though. I promise.

Dear Carolyn at age 18,

Yes, I know your ego’s wounded right now because your ex-boyfriend of a year — the first boy you ever slept with — is the first boy who’s ever dumped YOU. You haven’t found anyone else you wanted to date, either. And you’ve been having a spectacularly crummy senior year of high school. You studied your butt off for 12 years, and people are now convinced you’ve managed to coast by on fiendishly clever cheating. You made a 30 on your ACT, and people figured you must have cheated on that too.

And to be honest, you did cheat a few times in school. Three times in 12 years. Once on a biology test, when you gave answers to an old friend who was begging. Once on a history test when you were too bored by the material to study. And once on another teacher’s history test, when you were too contemptuous of the teacher’s stupidity and her read-from-the-book style of teaching. You had gotten a bit lazy; let’s admit that. But the reaction from the world around you is way out of proportion. It is mob mentality. Cheating doesn’t deserve respect. But it doesn’t deserve hatred, either.

Kids you’ve known since kindergarten are shunning you in the hallways. Teachers, for god’s sake — teachers are starting rumors that you bought teacher’s textbooks so you’d have all the answers. Nobody at school will date you. No one will talk to you. And no one trusts you. Remember the library lady? When you were studying in the library, looking at your notes and repeating the information over and over to yourself, trying to memorize information for a big test, the librarian yanked your book away and shrilly insisted that you were trying to pass answers to someone taking a test across the hall. You looked up, astonished, to see that the classroom door across the hall from the library was open. The librarian made a huge, loud, arm-flapping scene and never believed you. Sorry  to tell you, but she fully intends to glare at you the rest of the year. The library, which has been one of your havens, is going to be another place to endure.

And oh, Lord, that stupid correspondence course. You are such a nerd, you wanted to take two years of Latin but it wouldn’t fit in your schedule, so you decided to take one of the required history courses by correspondence course with a nearby college so you’d have room for your beloved Latin. You don’t know it yet, but that is going to be a big heartache for you. You aren’t going to manage your time well and you will get behind. A teacher will overhear you asking a friend if he’ll do one of the homework assignments for you. She will go ballistic and call the college, trying to get you thrown out so you won’t graduate. But you don’t need to worry. You are smart and brave, and you will own up to your mistakes. You’ll get to the phone first and confess to the college professor who administers the tests. The prof will be so pissed at some nosey high school teacher’s interference that she’ll tell you, “We don’t care who does the homework; that’s mainly so you know the material well enough to pass the test. You just let her call me.” The professor will send that teacher away with a bug in her ear. You’ll pass the course with an A+.

Of course, that teacher also happens to be the counselor for the whole high school, so she doesn’t help you at all with college apps or scholarships, and you’ll end up with just one measly $500 grant you get on your own. But that’s OK too. You’ll learn to depend on yourself.

And the senior prom. You’ll invite that stupid but delicious boy from the Delta who you met through your friend, Karen. I wish I could tell you, “MISTAKE!” He’ll drive down for the weekend and stay with another senior guy he knows. But the other guy, Chris, is one of the cool kids who hates you for being nerdy smart. They’ll decide to play a funny prank on you, calling on the day of the prom to tell you the cute guy can’t come because his crazy mom grounded him and locked him in his room. You believe in being a decent person and you’ll try to be nice because you figure he’s upset and embarrassed, so you’ll just say you understand. Then you’ll go to your room and cry your heart out, because after the senior year you’ve had, it’s just too much. I wish I could tell you not to cry, because that silly ass of a boy will show up in an hour, laughing. And you’re a nicer person than I am now, so you’ll go with him to the prom anyway because you don’t want to miss it and you’ll be damned if you’ll let anyone’s behavior make you sit at home. You’ll even wear his green and yellow corsage with your purple and pink dress (yeah, he knew the colors). He is so pretty, but he’ll spend most of the prom looking at his reflection in the mirrored walls instead of at you.

And it’ll get worse, I’m afraid.

Even your best friend, Kathy — who spent years riding around in your Thunderbird, drinking beer and ogling boys and listening to your Commodores 8-tracks — will hate you for a while. She’ll ask you to postpone going on the senior trip to Florida with all the rest of the class for a few days because she can’t get off work from her part-time job the weekend after graduation. At first you’ll say yes because you love Kathy, but then you’ll start to resent having to sit around, waiting for her. So you’ll call her back and confess that you really don’t want to wait. You’ll offer to give her some of your saved money to help her afford the trip, because you think that’ll solve the problem. It still won’t work, she’ll tell you tearfully; she is required to be at her job that weekend. At that point you’re kind of crumbling because this is KATHY after all and would it kill you to wait, but in the background, you heard her bitchy older sister screaming how selfish you are and, “No wonder she doesn’t have any friends!” And while Kathy is telling her sis to shut up, you’ll scream back and hang up. And that’ll be it for you and Kathy. She’ll offer you an olive branch later on, but by then you’ll be too shell-shocked to do more than hug her. It’ll never be the same.

A word of advice to you: When you don’t feel good, stay home. As luck would have it, it will happen to be the day the school officials announce you are salutatorian. Good thing, because you will later hear there was a virtual student and teacher uprising over that.

I know 18 looks bleak for you. No romance, no friends, hatred simmering in the air. But you know what? These people who are so eager to judge you and so delighted to hate you for being book smart and socially awkward won’t matter more than a grain of sand in the big picture of your life. And they’ll have stumbles of their own. They’ll also be misjudged. They’ll go on in the years to come to have divorces, jobs lost, money squandered, children go astray … all manner of pains and shames and mistakes of their own. And you’ll figure out — many years later — that they have NO IDEA of everything else that is going on in your life to make you seem so self-centered and distant. What seems like stuck-up to them is just you keeping family secrets.

They don’t know your stepfather lost his business and is a vodka-soaked falling-down drunk or that your mom holds a cocked loaded pistol to his head some nights and asks you whether she should shoot him and that sometimes you just say, “I really don’t give a shit.” They don’t know that your stepfather sometimes goes out into the pasture and tries to fuck one of the cows, who always kicks him and breaks a few ribs, and you come home to see him with taped-up ribs and hear them having THAT fight again. They don’t know that your mom and stepdad are less than a year away from a divorce and that your mom will spend the next year going quietly nuts at home and making tearful calls to you at college. They don’t know that sometimes you drink tequila or Jack Daniels until you puke and don’t remember much the next day, when you’re still drunk anyway.

And you will never, ever have to see the people from one of the loneliest years of your life any more if you don’t want to. In fact, I can tell you that you’ll last see them in 1979. Twenty-nine years later, you won’t have seen any of them since graduation, although you will come pretty close to attending one class reunion before deciding to let it go. Not because you think you’re too good. Because you don’t want to think about those days ever again.