Dear Ellie (aged 16),
Some advice from a path well trodden:
In eight short weeks you will sit your GCSE’s, and although you will achieve good grades on the limited amount of revision you actually undertake, you will regret not pushing yourself harder.
Nevertheless, A-Levels beckon. Just watch out for your English teacher. He’s one of those stealth bullies that favours the popular kids and ridicules the shy ones. You’ll stand up to him (via another teacher) and it will feel great!
Over the summer you will ‘blossom’. Your body will change in the ways you’ve been willing it to for so long. One word of advice; when you read Judy Blume’s ‘Are you there God? It’s me, Margaret’ ,don’t practice her ‘I must, I must, I must increase my bust!’ mantra too often. You more than anyone will be surprised at the astonishing results.
Soon enough the ‘popular’ boys at school won’t have reason to laugh at you and tease you by typing 55378008* into their calculators, in fact your newly grown, ahem, assets will be a source of attention for many years to come. Sometimes you’ll enjoy the attention but mostly you’ll just wish people would talk to your face.
You’ll spend the next few years slowly becoming less and less at ease with your body. You’ll feel fat when you look thin. Feel ugly when you are pretty and feel worthless when you are worthy. Please be kinder to yourself. You are lovely, just as you are.
In your circle of friends you will needlessly feel like the wallflower. When they are all coupled up you will feel like the perpetual gooseberry. Just run with this. You will wait longer than them to find ‘the one’ (and kiss a lot of frogs along the way) but he will be worth the wait and you will find him closer to home than you expect.
When you are 18 you will go away to university. Over the course of the next three years you will have some of the best and worst experiences of your life. You will meet friends whom you will navigate your life with. All these elements will play their own integral parts in shaping you into the woman you will become.
Although you may not learn as much as you’d hoped academically, (because honestly, you gave up trying) you will learn how to shake off your shackles of shyness, and become for a while a slightly crazy version of the woman you will one day be. Try to find the balance between wild child and sensible before you burn out.
There will be some very dark days ahead. Remember that it is still OK to need your friends and family. You will push them away when you need them the most in an attempt to shield them from pain. But, in the long run this will lead only to bitterness. Accept help when it’s offered, it’s not out of pity, it’s out of love.
You won’t take any of this advice because you are stubborn (just like me) so when we arrive exactly here on our parallel paths it’ll be a comfort to know that it was the right path.
Love from Ellie (aged 34)
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*Stand on your head to read this
This post was written for the Writing Workshop at ‘Sleep is for the weak‘.
{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
Oh such a familiar story. I couldnt and wouldnt write a letter to my 16 year old self, she was not very nice or grown up!!
Wonderful. Sad. Growing up can be so hard, we're so vulnerable. And our kids have got all this to come. Wipes away tears.
you are very brave giving yourself advice at that age, i could not do that! i considered myself to be outgoing sophisticated and of course always right at sixteen, now i realise i was self centered silly and almost always wrong! hahaha, there is no way i would have listened to an adults advice even if it did come from a much nicer more mature future me x
wow – so many people have done what i would have felt waaay too exposing – very proud – tis a great post
I too would have been too stubborn to take any advice from anyone 
(like the new seasonal blog btw)
I wish the 'I must, I must, I must increase my bust!' manta had worked for me! Maybe I wasn't doing it right! (I still get man typing 55378008 into their calculators!)
Jealous of your 'assets'!!
A wonderfully humble post – but I love that you acknowledge that it is the hard times and the mistakes that help bring you to this place. So true.
Bug ((hugs)) to your 16 year old self – she sounds like a very special girl xx
I got the boobless thing, too, in class. Boys can be so uninspired. Lovely letter.
Beautifully written. Some aspects sound very familiar.
It's so hard to look back ane see how we went wrong.But those were the choices we made at the time and It makes us what we are today.Lovely writing.
Lovely post, and a pleasure to read