What’s one thing you know now that would have saved your younger self a lot of pain?
It had been over 40 years since Nancy looked inside the box of “stuff” she’d been shuttling from house to house with every move. After this last, and she swore final, move, it got tucked away in the corner of the attic along with the old skis and Cody’s baby clothes.
The attic needed to be cleaned out for the central air unit being installed. Mark brought the box down and laid it at her feet saying, “I’ve moved this box 100 times, are you ready to let go of it?”. “Not without going through it first!”. “Well then, get on it”, and he walked away.
She opened it slowly, waiting to see if a mouse would be staring up at her. “No mouse, whew!”, she thought. But oh, what is this?
Sitting on top was her diary. Nancy was ten years old when she received it that Christmas from her older sister. What a find!
She settled back in her comfy chair and started reading. Five years. Some much changed between ages ten and 15. There were even some entries from when she was in college!
For a few entries she cringed, but most of them brought a smile to her face.
While flipping through the pages, something fell out. It was a note from a boyfriend when she was in her sophomore year of high school and she remembered clearly, it didn’t end well.
She read through the note and remembered how sad it made her. Everything he said he didn’t like, was her! She was 15, of course she was emotional! She was a cheerleader and a very friendly person in general, but he accused her of flirting. “Love of oneself, blinds one to one’s own faults”?! “What are you, Shakespeare?What the hell”, she thought, and followed that with “Fuck You!”.
The note brought those 15 year old emotions back to the surface and she remembered when the relationship ended how she tried to make herself smaller so she wouldn’t draw attention to herself. She had hoped he would see that she wasn’t that person any more and he would want to go back out with her. It hadn’t worked, he had moved on.
They say Hindsight is 20/20, and Nancy wished she could teleport herself back to 1976 to tell her younger self, “Be You. Be Brave. Be Kind to yourself. Never make yourself small to fit into someone’s idea of you. Regardless of what he said, Love yourself. The problem was not you, it was Him. The hangups were on him, not you.”
Nancy sat and read entries from her diary until the sun began setting through the trees. She enjoyed reading those moments in time, but she was happy she didn’t have to relive them!
