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Dear Younger Self - by Katelyn Vessey

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  • Page ID
    178451

    • Katelyn Vessey at Pima Community College
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    Dear younger self,

    Hey, how are you feeling? From what I remember not too well huh? I wish I could tell your life is great and you have become so happy. Do not give up, you do find different kinds of happiness. I do not remember when we started feeling like this. I remember all our days spent in bed, not eating, watching the same movie repeatedly. We would spend hours feeling the water of the shower head hit our body. Feeling so empty and lonely, wanting someone by our side so badly but too afraid to tell anyone. The feeling that anything we did was a huge task, took all our energy to get out of bed. I wish you did not have to go through this alone.

     During this difficult time our grandmother just died and that hit us extremely hard. I remember feeling sad beforehand, but I do believe that it pushed us over the edge. Covid started a couple months after we started having these intense emotions of sadness. When covid started, it was comforting to have an excuse to stay home and not see people. Laying in the house sounded like the only option we had. I could not have imagined leaving the house. Laughing, smiling, and making conversation sounded like a nightmare. We were relieved not to go to school or get out of bed. Our mom worked overnight so we were all alone at night and during the day while she slept. I understand that is what she had to do to support us, however it left us feeling completely alone at the house. Now, our depression was not her fault or our grandmothers passing, it just made everything feel lonely.

    I am happy to tell you that it does get easier. Do not give up on yourself, you will come a long way. This life is crazy and messy, but it can be beautiful. There will always be ups and downs in your life. Try to focus on the ups and don’t let the downs eat you up. There are going to be more challenges that you will face. More people will walk out of your life, and it will feel lonely. You need to focus on the person that does come into your life, show them so much love. Both them and you do not know how much you guys will help each other. You will start going to the gym and that will help your mind. Going on car rides feels peaceful when your mind feels like it is suffocating.

    I want to leave you with some things that helped us get to the place we are at. I know we are not perfect now and probably will never be. You will find out that no one is. We start making it a point to get out of bed every morning. It is important for us to start our morning off with getting up. If we do not, they we will not get out of bed that day. I mentioned the gym and going on drives helps us clear our mind. It does, cleaning oddly does too. I wish I could tell you what changed in our mind to jump start our way back out. It gradually got better for us, there are days where we are knocked back down. We still have days were all we want to do is lay in bed and do not feel like putting on a smile. The good will always way out the bad.

    There are people to help you that you do not even notice. School is not our favorite place, it does get better, but the counselors do have resources. I know we are scared to go to them, and we did not. However, it probably would have been useful for us. Knowing your options gives you more peace of mind. The job we have now even helps with therapy. You feel that you will not make it and that your life won’t turn out good. I am here to tell you hold on; our life gets easier. You will have a stable home and people that care for you. You are not alone in this world. Life won’t always be like this, life is rewarding. Everyone says that you are so young and so much life to live. Knowing us we probably would just roll our eyes at them, but it is true we have so much life to live. I wish you could love yourself the way you love other people. You know how it feels to be at your lowest and you never know when somebody is at theirs. Be kind to yourself and to others.

    Keep your head up,

    Your future self

    This page titled Dear Younger Self - by Katelyn Vessey is shared under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Katelyn Vessey at Pima Community College.