Letters to my younger self !

Last month, while cleaning out an old cupboard at my parents’ house, I found my school diary. It had a brown cover, a broken lock, and my name written on the first page in that careful handwriting kids use when they’re trying very hard to be neat.

I sat on the floor and read it for two hours.

Most of it was ordinary: what I ate, who sat next to me, a long angry page about a friend who didn’t invite me to their birthday. But somewhere in the middle, in pencil, I’d written one line that stopped me:

“I hope when I grow up I am not scared all the time.”

I was eleven.

I closed the diary and felt something heavy in my chest, because honestly, I’m still scared a lot of the time. Just about different things.

So I decided to write back to that kid, and to every version of me that came after.

Dear 8-year-old me,

You’re at the dinner table again, pushing food around your plate and listening to your parents argue in that low, tight voice they think you can’t hear.

You can hear it. You always could.

You’ve already started making yourself small. You get good grades so nobody has one more thing to worry about. You stop asking for a new school bag even though yours is torn. You crack jokes at dinner, because when everyone’s laughing, nobody’s fighting.

So here’s what nobody told you:

It was never your job to keep the peace.

You were a child. You were allowed to be loud, messy and a little annoying. You were allowed to ask for things and to cry without hiding in the bathroom with the tap running.

Years later, your father will sit with you on the balcony over two cups of chai and say, out of nowhere, “We weren’t always fair to you, were we?” You won’t know what to say. But something inside you that has been clenched for twenty years will finally loosen.

Stop carrying the whole house on your small shoulders. It was never yours to carry.

Dear 13-year-old me,

I know about the mirror.

I know about the comment a relative made at that wedding, “Someone’s gotten a bit healthy, no?”, and how you barely ate properly for two weeks after. I know you started hiding in loose clothes and stepping out of group photos.

When I look at pictures of you now, I see someone with big curious eyes and a goofy smile. I see someone who filled the back of their notebook with doodles and could talk for hours about things they loved. You weren’t “fine if you just changed a few things.” You were simply fine.

One day, sitting in a hospital waiting room beside your grandmother, you’ll look at her wrinkled hands and think: I have never once thought her hands were ugly.

That’s when it clicks. The people who love you were never looking at what you were so ashamed of.

Your body isn’t a project to fix. It’s the place you live.

Dear 17-year-old me,

The admission forms are on your desk, and everyone has an opinion. The only thing you’ve ever really loved is writing, but whenever you mention it, people smile politely and say, “Yes, but as a hobby.”

So you pick what’s safe.

I won’t call that a mistake. It gives us stability, our own rent money, and the ability to help family when they need it. But please know this:

The choice you make at 17 is not a life sentence.

You’ll stop writing for almost five years. Then, at 28, after a terrible week at work, you’ll write a short piece at 2 a.m. about your grandmother’s kitchen and post it online. By morning, strangers will have messaged you: “This is exactly how my grandparents’ house felt.”

That’s how it starts again. Late, but not too late.

An old colleague of mine left his bank job at 52 to open a bakery. Everyone called him crazy. Last time I visited, there was a queue out the door. He told me, “The only real deadline is death. Everything else is just a suggestion.”

Dear 20-year-old me,

I know you think this person is the one.

I know your whole mood depends on whether they reply with a heart or just “ok.” I know you rehearse every text before sending it.

Love isn’t supposed to feel like a test you keep failing.

When it ends (on an ordinary Tuesday, in a phone call that lasts less than four minutes), you’ll think you can’t survive it. Your roommate will quietly leave plates of instant noodles outside your door and never say a word about it.

Remember that roommate. Real love was in those plates of noodles, in the friends who showed up, and in your mother saying, “Come home this weekend, I’ll make your favourite.”

Someday you’ll meet someone who replies like it’s the easiest thing in the world. It might feel almost boring at first, because you’re so used to chaos.

Stay with the peace. That’s what love is supposed to feel like.

Dear 24-year-old me,

You’re about to lose someone, and I’m so sorry.

Your grandmother will send you a voice note on a Thursday, singing an old song badly and laughing. You’ll think, I’ll call back on the weekend.

The weekend comes. You’re tired. You’ll call next week.

There is no next week.

“Later” is a word we use as if we own time. We don’t.

Call people back. Say “I love you” at the end of phone calls even when it feels awkward. Ask your parents about their childhood. Record their voices. Write down their recipes.

Grief never really leaves; it just changes shape. At first it’s a boulder on your chest. Later it’s a stone in your pocket. It’s always there, but some days you’ll touch it and smile, because it’s heavy for the same reason it was precious.

Dear 27-year-old me,

You’re exhausted, and you think this is just what adulthood feels like.

One morning you’ll sit in your car in the office parking lot and won’t be able to make yourself go inside. You’ll stay there forty minutes, hands on the steering wheel, not knowing why you can’t move.

That day will scare you, but it will also save you.

You’ll finally talk to someone. You’ll learn words like “boundaries” and “burnout,” and they’ll stop sounding like buzzwords and start feeling like medicine. You’ll start leaving work on time, and the world won’t end.

Rest is not a reward you earn. It’s a need, like water.

You were worth something long before that job, and you’ll still be worth something long after it.

And finally, dear present me,

Yes, you, reading this with your tea going cold.

You still get scared. You still overthink sometimes. Some days you still say yes when you mean no.

But look how far you’ve come. You’ve survived every bad day you’ve ever had: every heartbreak, every loss, every 3 a.m. panic.

That eleven-year-old who wrote “I hope when I grow up I am not scared all the time” wasn’t really asking to never feel fear. I think they were asking, “Will I be brave anyway?”

The answer is yes. Every single time, yes.

Before you go

If you could write one line to your younger self, what would it be?

Leave it in the comments. Someone else’s younger self might need to read it today. 💛