Letter to 35 year old Veronica

Dear Veronica,           

First of all, let me congratulate you on paying off your school loans!!! WOOOOO! And if they’re not paid off by 35, I want you to do me a favor and punch yourself in the arm. Great, thanks. Now I’m going to tell you all the things I hope we’ve accomplished by 35.

1.      School loans GONE.

2.      Traveled to England, Ireland (again), Australia, and Scotland.

3.      Swam with dolphins.

4.      Saw a Broadway show in New York.

5.      Been to Disney World and Universal.

What was the other thing….hmm….what was it again? Oh yeah, I remember now. BE A PUBLISHED AUTHOR. Please, please, please be a published author. If you’re not, you need to reevaluate everything you’ve been doing the past nine years. Unless something terrible happened and it set you off the course of being a writer. I understand it’s exhausting and scary and nerve wracking to constantly put your work out there and be rejected. But you have to remember how much you love it. How much you love writing and how your brain actually hurts if you don’t write for a long time. Writing is your therapy, it saves your sanity and you need it. So if for some reason, you strayed from it, go to Target (Target better still be around), go to the journal and stationary section, and pick out a new one. Take it home, sit at your desk and write. Write about why you stopped. Write about what you ate that day. I don’t care what you write about just do it. Enjoy the pen being in your hand again and learn to love it again. Do it for 13 year old Veronica and 25 year old Veronica. We all appreciate it….I’m starting to sound a little like Sybil.

If you’re married, I mean…cool? It’s not something I ever really sought after or saw in my ten year plan but if you found someone willing to tolerate your constant chatter and watching movies from the 80s then awesome. Hope you didn’t spend a fortune on the wedding and instead put it towards a destination honeymoon.

If you have children…I don’t even know what to say about it. Children are an aspect of life I never saw myself taking part in. I can’t imagine why or how my opinions on this would change in ten years because I’ve known for the past ten they are not what I want. I’m not trying to upset you or guilt you if you did end up having kids. I just want there to be a really great reason for it. And if you did have kids, well they better be boys or tomboys and they better love old school Disney movies.

There are other things I wish for us. I hope Mom, Dad, and Dave are all okay and doing well. I hope you’re still friends with the people I’m friends with now because I can’t imagine a life without them. Even if you don’t see them all the time, do us a favor? Give them a call and go hang out. Probably at Bill and Chrissy’s house, like always.

Being 35 doesn’t scare me. I finally feel (at 25) we’re hitting our stride. You know we never felt our age as a teenager. Always wanting to be older, to get to the better part of life. The part I’m in now is good, really good actually but I hope yours is better. I hope it only ever gets better with age. Growing up doesn’t scare me and I hope it still doesn’t scare me when I’m 35.

Please be happy. We spent a lot of years being unhappy. We spent a lot of years being upset and taking things too seriously and beating ourselves up.

I hope you’re okay.

I hope you’re better.

I hope you are so very happy with your life.

And if you’re not, then change it.

Right now.

-25 year old Veronica

Letter to the Boy I Thought I Loved

Dear Boy,

I thought I was head over heels in love with you. I thought I knew exactly what that meant. I thought if I loved you enough, it would make up for the fact that you didn’t love me at all. 
I used to blame myself for a lot. It’s okay if you don’t treat me all that well, I’m just lucky you even hang out with me. It’s okay for you to hook up with and sleep with my friends, you’ll realize one day you were meant to be with me all along. It’s okay if you don’t let me see my other friends, it just means you want me to spend all time with you. It’s okay if you’re mean to me, I was in the wrong anyway.

You selfish, manipulative jackass. How dare you make me feel like that? How dare you make me feel as if I am nothing without you? 18 years old and my entire self-worth went down the toilet and it wasn’t all that great to begin with, which you knew and used against me. You treated my problems as if they were meaningless. You treated me as if I was expendable and I probably was to you. I watched you go through other female friends as if we were all sitting on shelves waiting for you to pick us. And when you did, we were supposed to act like you bestowed this great kindness for letting us be around you. 

The worst part about you is your god damn charm. You could get women to tell you anything. I told you everything I hated about myself, every insecurity, every reason I thought I was going to be alone forever. Then when I no longer fit your standards, you used everything I ever said against me. I believe the words you used were “fugly”, “horrendous personality”, and “fat”. The best part was how you did it. You wrote all those things on my Myspace. You were ahead of your time with cyber bullying. I watched you do it to other people and then you did it to me. Always braver behind your computer.

I cried and cried until I became furious and finally told you to never contact me again, once and for all. You damaged me for other people. You made me distrustful of most men for a long time. You made me doubt if my best friends even really liked me. I’m not going to lie, it took me years to build myself back up. To make myself better. To feel as if I deserved happiness and love again. But I did it.

It wasn’t like a switch where I just turned off any feelings I had for you. They changed over the years: love to hatred to missing you to hating you and then one day, it happened. I realized I had gone months and months without even thinking about you. Not until someone mentioned your name and it was as if, I realized how free I was of you. You were gone, truly and finally gone. Of course, your words linger on my darkest days but then I remember who you are and how you mean nothing to me anymore. You were just a bad couple of years in a life filled with so many good ones. 

I still haven’t run into you and it’s been seven years. I like to pretend it is Fate’s way of telling me how right I was in my decision to cut you out. And I honestly have no clue how I would react if I saw you. Punching you in the face seemed like a wonderful option for years. But now? I’m stumped as to what I would even say or do. I know what you would do because as much as I hated you, I still knew you better than anyone else. You would act as if we’re still best friends, as if nothing happened between us. I’d rather not pretend.

As much as I hated you, you did me a favor. By leaving your side, I found my way back to my real friends. The people who love me unconditionally have constantly been teaching me to love myself the same way. The way you never could. 

It’s funny when we’re teenagers and we think we know what love is. Maybe some do.

I certainly didn’t.

Goodbye,
Veronica