The Letter

It was a Wednesday morning. Becca sat in the relative calm of her room, ignoring the noise of the news blasting from the TV in the living room and the barking dogs and crowing roosters outside. She hadn’t slept well in about a month, at least not in the kind of way that really reenergizes you. From her imploding mattress which had been on a slow crawl to the bedroom furniture grave for months, to her overactive dream-brain, to the seemingly constant overnight parties loud enough to rattle her windows and her brain, it had not been a particularly restful time. Perhaps from lack of sleep, though probably more from lack of home, Becca was suffering what many have called a mid-service crisis, only a few months late. 

She’d tried to let it out through tears and conversations. She’d blasted “Let It Go” too many times to count. Still, no dice. So she took out a piece of paper and began to write a letter.

Dear You,

This life, this tiny, little life you’re living is incredibly, annoying, nauseatingly imperfect. There will be times that you are angry or depressed in an almost explosive manner and those times will suck, but the scarier times will be the apathetic ones. With two emotions, apathy and rage, you’ll try to navigate through your daily life, simultaneously counting the days until you return home and cursing yourself for doing so. 

At some point you’ll start to worry about what’s going to happen when you finally get home. You’ll be deeply concerned that no grad school program will want you, or that boy you thought cared won’t want you or no one will care that you’ve finally made it home. You’ll worry that home disappeared in the time that you were gone and was replaced with something unfamiliar and cold. 

The worrying will make you cry and the crying will make you sniffle and the sniffles will make you sleepy and the sleepies will make you sleep for hours and days until you feel numb to everything. And then you’ll wake up and take a deep breath and go outside and you’ll feel the sun shining down on you and drying out all the sorrow and then a man will walk by and whistle at you and the soft sunlight will turn to angry rage tears.

It will get better because frankly if it didn’t no one would encourage other people to do this crazy thing. It will become a part of your life that you characterize and the hardest thing you’ve ever done, that you think of fondly, that you miss as much as you miss home now. It will become “defining” and “a period of growth” rather than exhausting and horrible. 

Just remember that everything shifts, sometimes quickly and sometimes slowly but it always changes so nothing stays this difficult for too long. Just hold on to yourself and remember who you are.

Best,

Your Friend