Things I might tell my 21 year old self

Summer of 1987.

I’ve been taking an online writing course “Writing in Lists” and this came from today’s session…

At 21, I hardly had life figured out. Far from it. I had already met the man who would become my husband, but if you’d told me that then, I never would have believed you. Arron was a player. He thought of me as a kid. He’d broken up with me after three weeks of dating me when one of his girlfriends who’d left Toronto to go to culinary school came back because she realized she didn’t like cooking that much. He eventually dumped her, and wandered back into my purview, but by then I was headed back to University where I chafed against my loneliness, despite a few guys who seemed interested in dating me, but who, for reasons I couldn’t explain, I kept at arms length. I didn’t like my university much and so found excuses to make the two hour drive home to Toronto for the weekend about once a month. I spent a good deal of those weekends with Arron making him clams and linguini but refusing to sleep with him.

So what would I tell that girl? Would I want to lay out her life before her? All its heartbreaks? Would she even believe me? “You are going to live a rather dramatic life,” I might say cryptically. “You will not wallow in mediocrity, as you seem to worry about, but your interesting life won’t come in the way you imagine.” Would she have believed any of it? Would she have cared? “You will find love,” I might have prophesied, “cherish every moment,” I might have warned. She might have understood, subconsciously to cherish those moments.

But it would be a few years of wallowing in self-pity, getting out of a university that didn’t fit, knowing she should have gone to art school. She would find herself in Sydney living with a woman who could only be described as a nymphomaniac. She would write long, endearing letters to that man who would become her husband, laying her heart out on the page. She was gaining experience at being alone in places that didn’t make sense to her. “You are where you need to be,” might have been lost on her. “This is your practice life,” might not have.