WHAT ARE YOUR TWO WORDS?
A friend of this page named Patti sent me this…such a cool question.
I myself had three possible answers.
1) "Calm down." (This was my first thought. But I eventually rejected this one, on account of the fact that is STILL the advice I need to follow, so it doesn't have much to do with being young, specifically…)
2) "No boys." (Oh, god — what I could have done with my youth had I not gotten so entangled in so many doomed romances! The hours, the months, the YEARS that I gave away to boys! The drama! The infatuations! The tears! All those evenings spent watching "Predator" again and again! I just read a study saying that 30% of all students at Ivy League universities are virgins, and I thought: "Well, of course!" If I had stayed away from boys, and instead used all that time productively, I also could have mastered Mandarin and physics and violin by the age of 21.)
3) "Never mind." (This is what I finally settled on. Because everything I did when I was young — every mistake, every drama, every failure, every euphoric encounter, every dream, every yearning — has made me who I am today. And while I am far from perfect, I cannot help but believe that I needed become exactly this person, which is to say that I needed all those experiences, precisely the way they were. So if my younger self asked my advice, I would just say, "Never mind." Do exactly what you're doing. It all takes you where you need to be. A thought which becomes kind of reassuring, in terms of the mistakes I am probably making today…if you get my drift…)
What about you guys?
Two words to some lost version of yourself?
Go for it!
LG
