Dear Younger Me

I asked different women: "If you could speak to your younger self, what lesson would you tell her?". I don't know what I was expecting from their answers but needless to say, I received emotional responses from each of them that sparked intrigue in me. To my great surprise, I found that many of the ladies I asked had some variation of the same lesson, using the same words. Maybe it's the scientist in me, but this observation led me to launch an experiment.

I asked more women and the responses were more or less the same. Here's a small sample of the similar responses that I received.

"To live for herself and not for anybody else."

"Don't let others control your life."

"Stop worrying about what others think of you or your body.”

"I wish you would stop comparing yourself to yourself to your siblings or other girls“

Are you sensing the pattern? The conclusion I draw from this is that a large amount of girls feel subjected to the opinions of others and thus allow themselves to be controlled into living a life others deem acceptable at the cost of their self esteem and happiness.

Writing this made me think of the philosophical movement of Existentialism. It is a thought process that humans live their lives in objectification. Humans are consumed with what others think of them and allow society to define who they are. I cannot even begin to dive into the ramifications this has for the emotional health of the girls today that will grow up to be the women of tomorrow. The danger of knowing her time is taken up by thinking of what others think of her?

What makes this realization more heart breaking is that most of us girls felt the same way growing up but we never knew. The issue felt isolated. Thus, we learned the lesson the hard way eventually.

We need to get to a point where we share this with young girls, with each other. This will show us that the struggle isn’t solitary. We can’t travel back in time and really tell our younger selves anything. But we can change the future by telling girls what we know now. All of these lessons are vital. Don’t let anyone control your life, young lady. Stop worrying about what others say about you or your body, baby girl. Live for yourself, little one.

Special shoutout to these ladies in particular. Your messages to your younger selves were exceptional.

Camila, Ruth, Leron, Valencia