The Most Important Thing I’d Tell My High School Self
There are lots of ways you could use time travel: Kill Hitler, gamble on sports, invest in the cupcake boom, high five John Lennon. But what if the only thing you were allowed to do was to find your younger self in high school and give them the advice that they so desperately needed? What would you tell them? There is a lot I think I would want and need to tell my high school self (do NOT flip the front of your hair up for school picture day!), so here is the letter I would leave in my old locker:
Dear Young me Chris,
Hope this letter finds you well, even though I know exactly how it will find you because this already happened from my point on the space-time continuum. I think you are probably really jazzed about eating Doritos and watching horror movies (By the way, that never goes away. We are so cool!), but you are also in high school so, YIPES! Am I right?! The good news is that this letter is from you! The you in the future who sort of figured out who he is, what he likes, and has stopped stressing about what everyone thinks of him. Which part of this do you find most incredulous? I would guess the part where you no longer worry about other people’s opinions of you. That must seem like hardcore science-fiction to you right now. I swear, though: this is all real!
I am allowed to give you one piece of advice right now. Don’t ask about the rules; just go with the flow. That piece of advice is to be yourself, and be yourself hard. I know you hear that a lot, and objectively it makes sense to you, but realistically it feels impossible. This is why it’s so important to follow through on the advice, though. Many things that are worth doing are going to be difficult. I know you have a proclivity to procrastinate (that doesn’t totally go away either, btw) and then completely set things aside because they are too difficult. The thing I will tell you, though, is that once I started being myself, everything else started falling into place. It took awhile to allow the world to fully see who I am, but once they did, they mostly liked what they saw! Imagine that!
Like I mentioned before, it is going to be hard. The payoff is both expectedly and unexpectedly great. You will find that people can relate to the actual you more than you ever could’ve realized, and you will find comfort from them as well. You also get to stop feeling exhausted trying to keep up the facade of being someone else, struggling to fit in, scrambling to find the perfect thing to say, and worrying endlessly if anyone likes you. Start sharing with others the things that YOU like. Talk about the subjects that interest YOU. The right people will begin to gravitate towards you. The more you become the you that you were meant to be, the more open your heart will become, and the more people will want to be around you. It’s like science… if science were all about having really dope friends.
Look, life is gonna be hard, friendo. There are some surprises around the corner. Some of them are great; some of them are gonna knock you all the way down. The more you’re you, the better you are going to be prepared for them. I can’t emphasize enough the freedom that comes along with relentlessly being yourself in the face of all that life throws your way. It gets a little easier when you know who you are and you know your friends like you for being that way. It won’t ever be all the way easy, but life isn’t supposed to really be simple. You want to be able to take things as they come, and the more you can sort out, the better off you will be. Once you sort this out, everything else will be just a little bit easier and that is what keeps you going. Good luck, from me to me!
Kick Butts!
Older Chris Calogero
P.S. The Red Sox are going to win the World Series. It’s bonkers! I know! But maybe throw a few bucks down on them in 2004.
