An Open Letter to Teenage Girls

Dear Teenage Girls,

Don't you dare.

Don't you dare waste everything I've worked for.

Okay, that's harsher than I meant. Let me explain.

See, you hurt me when you post stuff like "share this and see what your friends think about you!" or this gem right here:

I want to sit you down and bake you cookies and watch The Force Awakens or Buffy or Agent Carter and tell you that it genuinely does not matter what anyone else thinks about you. It only matters what you think about yourself and when you share posts like this:

you show me that you aren't sure of yourself, that you need affirmation from outside yourself. You don't. You don't, you don't, you don't. And I need you to see that, for your sake as well as mine.

When I was a teenager, I didn't have the self-awareness to see how much of a special flower I thought I was. I had friends, I thought I was smart, and I went through my daily life without too many worries. I thought I was being saved for someone fantastic, so I didn't really mind it when I didn't get a lot of male attention. I was actually frequently bemused and amused by it. (Justin Thomas, wherever you are, I am exceedingly sorry for laughing at you when you asked me out in the 9th grade. I hope I didn't scar you for the rest of your life.) I shrugged off ideas of what I should look like or how I should act. I had an idea in my head of who I was waiting for and one day, my prince charming would show up and we'd be happy and I could be content waiting for that to happen. Maybe you can identify with that, the waiting part if not the "being content" part.

That mindset saved me a lot of heartache, I think, but it also stopped me from some happiness, so I wouldn't necessarily recommend it. Sometime after I stopped being a teenager, I came to terms with the idea that Charming wasn't going to just show up in my life, as you do. And you meet a lot of temporary people in your twenties and I was in a lot of temporary situations, so I didn't go out looking for him either. You'd think that I'd be able to accept my role in this situation and learn to live with being alone if I wasn't willing to ante up the courage to go out and find someone, but if you think that, you're not a teenage girl.

Teenage girls, I get you now a whole lot better than I did when I was one of you. Hormones show up and mess up everything- periods (nightmares), bras (nightmares), emotions (absurd and perpetual nightmares). Your body gets you noticed or it doesn't and you lose either way- you get used to valuing your appearance or you see the value other girls' appearances give them but not you. You're told by everyone who to be and what to want. You're supposed to chase after romantic relationships. No, you're supposed to focus on school. You should have all these teenage experiences. But, more importantly, you should have a loaded activity section on your college application. You should be cute. You shouldn't care how you look. They might as well make flaming baton twirling mastery compulsory, just to give you a goal that's actually achievable.

That's the situation I found myself in when I hit my twenties. I should be finding myself, sure, but I should also be finding, in my case, a man- someone to complete me or whatever Halmark bullshit they're selling greeting cards with these days. I might have dodged the insecurity bullet when I was a teenager, but it got me right in the heart in my twenties. I wasn't pretty enough. Even when I tried, I wasn't pretty enough. I wasn't the girl that got asked out. I wasn't the girl that got looked at. Going through insecurity for the first time in your twenties has the added horror of knowing that your makeup looks ridiculous but not being able to call on expected inexperience to explain your failure. Here I am, a young independent woman and I can't figure out effing eyeliner. Or how to smile at the right time.

But I'm here to tell you that there's a way out. Learn to recognize the messages that are being sent to you. The world is like an encrypted enemy transmission- once you break the code, you have all the information you need to beat them. Recognize that the people who tell you that you have to be pretty are just selling something and now you have to choice of whether you want to dress up your body or not. Recognize that the people who tell you that you have to be dating someone don't understand your strength (and are maybe also selling something) and you get the choice of figuring out who you are when you're by yourself or figuring out who you are when you're with someone else. Recognize that the people who are defining normal for you are inventing a system of understanding the world that benefits them and that they are not thinking of your well-being and you get to have control over what normal is.

This is the only one of these pictures that I'll link to because this kitten is adorable.

Listen, you tiny teenage balls of worry and self-depreciation, you have immense value. Dress up or don't- how someone else reacts to your appearance is their problem. You are a gem either way. Smile at the person who makes your heart beat fast and take it as a blessing if they smile back and a fact of life if they don't. You can't control other people's emotions and thank God for that- it's hard enough to deal with your own. And, miracle of miracles, your worth is not increased or decreased by the number of humans who have a crush on you or want to date you or sleep with you. You breathe. You exist. That simple fact defines your worth much more clearly than the potential thoughts of other human beings.

So stop sharing those passive-agressive posts about how no one likes you or you're not pretty enough or you don't care how you look lol because we all know that "lol" really means that you're dying a little on the inside wishing someone would tell you you're pretty. You're fucking beautiful. Write that in your diary daily until you truly believe it in your spirit so that you can ignore all those voices in the world telling you any different. Or, better yet, accept that beauty is a made-up idea that you can choose to believe or disbelieve.

No, you don't dress up for school because you chose not to. No other reason.

Don't be your own worst enemy here. Make the difficult choice, every minute of every day, to listen to the voices that build you up and to ignore the ones that want to tear you down, even if those voices are in your own head. You'll be better for it. Then, once you know how fantastic you truly are, we can talk about reasonable assessment of skills and setting goals and bringing dreams into reality. But I really do believe that you have to start digging the well of self-worth now, so you can draw the water of self-reliance from it later. Enlist your friends in the project. Hand them a shovel. It's easier than digging alone and, once you've started your own well, you'll know how to help them dig theirs.

I had to work for this realization. You will too. But every single time you shout your ugliness into the world, you dump dirt down my well. You hurt me. Because I know what it's like to believe those lies. It's easier than believing the truth. The truth is that you get to say what is beautiful and what is ugly in the world. It's a terrible responsibility. But it's yours.

Be. Better.

gif source

Love,
A Twenty-Something Bundle of Wavering Confidence