Dear Teen Me

This week a letter I wrote is featured on the popular blog Dear Teen Me, a site where YA authors write letters to their former teen selves. It’s an inversion of the grade eight guidance exercise where you had to write a letter to your future self. Initially I thought these letters would be full of boring, wholesome platitudes like “be yourself” and “things come out okay in the end.” Instead the letters are intensely personal stories, mini memoirs, with lots of teenage blood and gore.

My first attempt to write my Dear Teen Me letter were full of boring platitudes (Just relax! Don’t stress!), but when I started digging deeper, I started remembering some intense high school memories. I had to stop and take a couple of deep breaths. I remembered things so

intensely personal and shameful that I couldn’t possibly imagine sharing them online. It also felt masochistic to relive some of those experiences, even for the purpose of educating or entertaining others.

I did manage to write a letter to myself that is deeply personal and a hard to read, but doesn’t make me look like a complete idiot. You can read it at www.dearteenme.com. In the mean time, here are some shorter memos to myself in the same teenage vein.

Dear Teen Me,

When you go to France, please don’t tell your host family you came to meet men. It doesn’t go over well and you have to move to another family. Yes, you’ll get a lot of mileage out of this story later, but at the time it’s devastating. So please, use a dictionary. You came to France to meet people, les gens, not les hommes.

Dear Teen Me,

When you have a party, don’t let the boys throw the beer bottles in your trash cans behind your house. Your father will come home, recycle them and make tame comments about the boys from the nearby school drinking in the lane. Then your mother will show up at your Hebrew school bottle drive with a station wagon full of beer bottles and also not say a word. Their total silence will

drive you bonkers.

Dear Teen Me,

Please don’t tell your sister to f-off in front of the rabbi during your bat mitzvah pictures. It makes your parents REALLY unhappy.

Dear Teen Me,

If you’re going to lie to your parents about where you’re going for the weekend (Sin Island), get your friends to cover for you. Otherwise they’ll know your parents are worrying about where you are and feel obliged to call and tell them. This isn’t good for anyone’s relationship.

Dear Teen Me,

If you’re going to fall off your sister’s bed and get gouged by the metal frame, please get stitches instead of “just using a band aid.” It’ll leave a smaller scar and you won’t have to wear shorts in February to accommodate the massive bandage on your leg.

Please feel free to share your own hopefully embarrassing Dear Teen Me moments.