Young Writers Society

The question is (fairly) simple - if you met yourself at a younger age, what would you tell them ?

I need this for a letter I am writing for a literary class. The task was a letter from Utopia and I went and wrote a letter that a middle-age woman from NY writes to her younger self in Maine in the 80's.

The only problem that I still have is that there no actual reason for her to be writing such a letter, so I ask all of you - what would be your reason ?

"It gets better."

It applies to all sorts of things. Especially for someone coming from Utopia--*any* issue she has while younger is fair game. Financial, romantic, health, etc. I'd actually recommend checking out the "it gets better" website for actual messages from older people speaking to the younger generation--it started out as mainly for LGBTQ youth and anti-bullying in general, but I believe it has expanded to be general encouragement (still particularly aimed toward anti-bullying).

If this person is a fictional character, you could give her a specific life problem that she has overcome and can encourage her younger self to hang in there and keep fighting.

I'd be writing my younger self a letter for two reasons:

One, I would've remembered at that point that I had once received a letter from myself, and two, I know myself and a letter that travelled through time would've made a younger me very excited.

Without discussing the paradoxes of the possibility, however, I suppose I'd want to remind myself of the important things. Tell that kid that many of those things she's worrying about aren't going to turn out as important as they feel at that point, and that she should dare to take those leaps she's thinking about, because she eventually would anyway and she'd look back and wonder why she hadn't done it way back then. And I would tell myself about the world that I'd once get to see/live in. If it's a world I like, I'd probably take the route Megrim mentioned, reminding myself that this too shall pass and the Bad Times aren't worth giving up; if it's not a world I like, I'd prompt my younger self to go through with the ides and plans brewing in her head and keep trying to make a difference.

Megrim wrote:"It gets better."

It applies to all sorts of things. Especially for someone coming from Utopia--*any* issue she has while younger is fair game. Financial, romantic, health, etc. I'd actually recommend checking out the "it gets better" website for actual messages from older people speaking to the younger generation--it started out as mainly for LGBTQ youth and anti-bullying in general, but I believe it has expanded to be general encouragement (still particularly aimed toward anti-bullying).

If this person is a fictional character, you could give her a specific life problem that she has overcome and can encourage her younger self to hang in there and keep fighting.

Well...that is the whole thing. The subject was a letter from utopia, but I turned it around and made a sarcastic joke from it. She writes a letter to her younger self, but it is a warning. She is unhappy in her "utopia" (basically the modern world. She writes to the 80s so you can see where the angle is coming from) and she writes a warning.