A Letter to My Teenage Self

Dear Jess,

I know you’re not going to like this letter. You’re not going to like the way your life turned out. At least not from where you stand. That plan you worked so hard on, the transcript you perfected…one day you might just ask, “Why?”

I know 25 was the deadline. The ‘have to be accomplished or I’m nothing’ deadline. It passed. We haven’t finished college. We didn’t get that teaching position in England. {But we did visit for a week, thanks to your little brother.} There is no Masters in Education. That screenplay you started in 11th grade…the one with Ophelia’s name? It’s still a draft. The novel? It’s a current work-in-progress.

{You are married to a wonderful man who shows you more grace than you’ve known and you have two beautiful, full of life, wild boys and a surprise on the way. Your life is good. It’s just not the good you think of now.}

I remember those days. I know how you walk the halls at school holding your breath, thinking at any time everything’s going to drop from underneath you. How people call you “perfect” and you just smile. I know how on the inside you’re tearing yourself to pieces covering yourself in words like stupid and worthless. I know you think you have to do it all to prove you’re enough, that you’re special.

Can I just tell you one thing and press it hard against your tired and lonely heart? You are not what you do. All the accomplishments, all the dreams, all the failings…they do not make you. Underneath that plastic smile and buttoned-up bravado, you’re dying inside to be free. To hear you’re beautiful and loved and enough.

You are beautiful. You are loved. And, precious girl, you are enough.

It’ll be a few more years before someone will sit down with you on a picnic table one Japanese fall night and tell you that Jesus loves you…that he really, truly loves you and it’ll begin to break your rock hard exterior.

I know that seems trite now. You’ve heard it all your life and you don’t feel his love. But he’s there. He’s always been there. And as I write to you from the beginning of our 30th year, I can only tell you there’ll be a time you’ll weep humbling, thankful, sobbing tears at the realization of how close He’s been. He’s there.

Just breathe. Take a deep breathe and let it all go. You don’t have to hold the world together. You don’t have to hold your life inside you. Let that Lucy Honeychurch falling in purple hills on the Italian countryside come out. There is so much beyond the view in your room.

Be free. 

Love,

Jess

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Emily Freeman, author of Grace for the Good Girl, just released her new book Graceful {for young women} this week. I haven’t read Graceful, but Grace for the Good Girl was everything my good girl, perfectionist, people pleasing heart wanted/needed to hear. To celebrate the new book Emily’s invited her readers to write letters to their teenage self.