To My Younger Self

You are going to spend so many years thinking that needing help is a different category of person than you. It isn't. You're going to find that out eventually, the hard way, in a parking lot, after a phone call you should have made months earlier.

Here's what I wish someone had told you sooner: the people you admire most, the ones who seem like they have it together — most of them are quietly carrying something too. You just can't see it, the same way no one could see yours. That doesn't make you weak. It makes you like everyone else, which is the thing you were always so afraid of and never needed to be.

You're going to be okay. Not because it gets easy. Because you're going to learn, eventually, that you don't have to do it without anyone.

Stop rehearsing conversations you're afraid to have. Just have them. The version in your head is always worse than the real one, and you are going to waste years of sleep on arguments that, when you finally have them for real, last four minutes and end in relief.

Also: it's okay that you don't know what you want to do yet. You're going to be so tired of that question. The answer isn't going to arrive because you worried it into existence. It's going to arrive because you kept living, and paying attention, and it showed up quieter than you expected, later than you wanted, and exactly on time.