A Word of Advice, with Love
Oh, sweet Abigail. You are so deeply loved. I know you don’t feel that way right now. But you are. I’m holding you from five years in the future. I’m giving you permission and space to fall apart for as long as long as it takes.
I feel like I could edit this forever. I have so much to talk with you about.
Truthfully, when I sat down to write this, I had to work through some anger toward you — because you’re about to make a bunch of decisions that present me would never make. But, if there’s one thing about you right now (maybe still), it’s that you learn through lived experience. Or, as your stiflingly Christian upbringing would say, The Hard Way.
So, I actually need to thank you. I wouldn’t be able to sit so effortlessly in my truth if you hadn’t just gone at life so fearlessly, so blindly, and so passionately. You learned a lot for me.
A word of warning.
You’re about to fall in love with someone who will ask you to get smaller and easier, again and again.
You’ll find one of your greatest passions and feel like you’re failing at it.
You’re going to make friends that feel so important and so special, and they won’t last.
You’ll cry, a lot, on the floor of two different apartments and your mother’s house that you moved back into (again).
You’re going to move to a new city where you have to put in effort to find a place to sit alone, in silence, with the trees. Your inner child will hate it at first, but the fact that you’re even talking with them is progress.
Try not to judge yourself. You’re so young you’re just getting to know yourself. And you’re going to make it out the other side of all of that. Of everything.
You’re making it out happier and more delicate in the way that makes you realize you’re worth protecting. I want you to know that you’re worth keeping safe. You’re worth being held. Destroying yourself can only be interesting for so long — and God fucking knows we love interesting — but I also love you, and you are interesting, no destruction necessary. You bring so much joy and honesty to every room you walk in, even if you’re the only one in it.
I want to tell you something we’ve always known, but it took looking into the eye
of God and eternity during a dark pandemic winter to realize.
You’re very gay and very nonbinary.
I know that terrifies you. Right now, you feel like life would be easier if you were more conventional to others. Sometimes, I still feel that way — it probably would be easier.
But in your soul of souls, you don’t want to be easy. You want to be you.
And you will be. You’re going to unfold so beautifully into yourself, into the person
you always needed.
You’ll have the rush of the secret gay hook-ups, and later the sanctity of the open ones, and fall in love with some of the wrong people and a few who change what falling in love means. You’ll find romance in friendships and humor in everything and be vibrant and loving and sweet and just have a good fucking time.
You’re enough. I’ll see you soon.
I love you.
