Advice to an 8th Grader

The picture is of me in the 8th grade, at the tender age of 14. We were newly into 1976, I'd reached my maximum height of five-foot-nine, and I was planning a graduation along with Barbara, my one classmate. I was dreaming of enrolling in school in Singapore where there would be--oh, glory!--an exciting, large student body of 72 students.  Seventy-TWO teenagers like me, most of them American. My body practically vibrated with the imminence of it.

This week Donna has invited the Comeback Bloggers--I'm one of those--to write about what advice we would give to our younger selves.

So I look myself in the face--me at the soft and rounded age of 14, me with the hair that would not straighten even with the aid of hair salon chemicals, me in the lime-green polyester dress and no makeup, me with hope and beneficence shining out of my eyes--and I ask myself, "What would I tell her? Can I boil it down to just one thing? What would have made a difference for good in her life?

I think I would tell her these things:

1. You are sturdy. Your husband will use that word in your first year of marriage to describe you, and you will be startled. But he will be right. Your body is sturdy, your soul is sturdy, and your brain is sturdy. You can depend on all of them, trust them all for a long time to come. No need for second-guessing yourself, holding back for fear of what others will think or whether their reactions will be positive or negative. Don't wait until you are old to wear purple. Be the person you'd like to be, right now, without temerity. You'll survive even better than you think.
2. You can depend on life to teach you humility. You have not yet failed spectacularly, but you will. And although it will hurt, though it will pierce your heart and crack your self-confidence and lay you low and bleeding, it will be good for you. Very good for you. You'll not regret the way failures will shape your character for the better. Failure will will teach you that you have no claim on specialness, that you can be gentle with others, that you need not require perfection of others, that there is always an unseen story, and that you must not judge others so harshly when they fall short. You need to learn that. Someday, perhaps, you will even learn to be gentle with yourself, ...but you won't have learned that yet by the age of 54. Just sayin'.
3. Things are not as they seem. Your family is not what you think it is. But you will survive the years of shock and revelation as you discover the truth and renegotiate relationships, and your connections with each of them will survive ... because you are sturdy. So hang in there when things shatter. Go for help.
4. This sounds trite because everyone says it, but you've got to figure out how to not care what others think of you. This will cause you more psychic anguish than any one thing. It will drive your actions, manipulate your emotions, reduce your effectiveness, limit you in just about every kind of way. STOP it. It really doesn't matter what others think of you. It only matters what they think. There is a difference--the difference between listening to what is important to others and treating it as valuable, and thinking that their thoughts must cause you to surrender your own value, calling, beliefs or intelligence.
5. Explore. Be more curious. Ask why.

I think that's a lot to load onto a soft, rounded, curly-haired 8th grader. Maybe it's good that she went on into life and discovered it for herself. Because I can't go back in time and tell her these things, I think she has lived life with a more enduring sparkle in her eye. I kind of like that.