Dear Teen Me Read online

  Fit. Between dance, track, and horseback riding, you’ve got amazing legs and a great rear end. These are things no amount of dieting can achieve.

  Talented. You continue to publish poetry and win every creative writing contest you enter. And you sure know how to rock ‘n’ roll.

  Different. You are sensitive and more caring than most. You are a rebel, and speak your mind, especially about inequalities you see. You are brave.

  Probable yearbook description: Most Likely to Take a Stand.

  You graduate near the top of your class. Tossing that tasseled cap feels like the first step toward freedom. It is a sprint toward adulthood, where life will be just as confusing as ever. You’ll drop out of college, choose the wrong guys. A couple will hurt you, and one will abuse you. Trust will come harder and harder. But each wrong turn makes you wiser. After a while you’ll realize that love isn’t about control. It’s about mutual respect. Long-term relationships are born of friendship. And that has nothing to do with how you look, but rather who you are inside.

  Eventually, you find forever connection with an amazing man. One who embraces you, and the responsibilities of a ready-made family. Yes, you’ll have three children, one of whom will be responsible for an earthquake of pain. But you’ll survive this heartbreak, too, and not only does it make you stronger, it puts you on the path you don’t yet know you’re searching for. (I’ll give you a hint: Keep writing poetry.)

  You will parent a fourth child, too. Full circle, you’ll adopt him when you are forty-two, the exact same age your mother was when she adopted you. And, full circle, he will be bullied and struggle with feeling different. Being adopted has that effect. But you’ve been there, and recognize the emotions he experiences. You will help him grow into a brilliant young man, in part because of the things you have been through yourself. Your past helps create his future.

  What I wish you could understand, teen me, is that the past does create the future. Everything that sets you apart also makes you unique. You are finding a distinctive voice, and one day that voice will speak not only to many, but also for many who can’t speak for themselves. All that rejection helps you grow a thick skin, one you’ll need when you finally settle into the career you were destined for. Being pushed away makes you want to gather others in. And you will, in ways small and immense.

  Of course, if you suspected any of this now, you might just crawl into your closet and stay there, where it’s private. Cozy. Safe. But here’s the thing: Life isn’t always safe. It isn’t always happy or pretty or neat. Sometimes it’s downright sad and ugly and messy. Dangerous, even. You have to take risks to discover courage. You must know pain to understand the true meaning of joy. And only through experiencing the sting of death will you come to cherish living.

  You will make mistakes. Everyone does. Accept that—no, value that—and keep moving forward. I promise, in the future you’ll look back and decide you wouldn’t change a thing. Each misstep, each sidestep, each baby step brings you one step closer to where you belong, and once you reach this place, every day will bring immense satisfaction.

  Dearest Teen Ellen. You were unusual from the start. Each inimitable day of your life helps create a voice completely your own.

  Ellen Hopkins is a poet and the award-winning author of twenty nonfiction books for children and numerous New York Times best-selling young adult novels in verse: Crank (2004), Glass (2007), Impulse (2007), Burned (2008), Identical (2008), Tricks (2009), Fallout (2010), Perfect (2011), Triangles (2011), and Tilt (2012). Her first verse novel for adults, Triangles, was published in 2011. Ellen lives with her husband, teenage son, two German shepherds, one rescue cat, and two ponds (that’s ponds, not pounds) of koi near Carson City, Nevada.

  Q and A:

  WHO WAS YOUR CELEBRITY CRUSH?

  “On my bedroom walls, I had pictures of: John Lennon, Matthew McConaughey, Leonardo DiCaprio, Ani DiFranco, and Bob Dylan.”

  Elizabeth Miles

  “Molly Ringwold–HUGE.”

  Geoff Herbach

  “Brad Pitt. He also, coincidentally enough, went to my high school—twelve years before me.”

  Tera Lynn Childs

  “The Beatles were first. Then Duran Duran and The Police. What can I say? I had a thing for pop rock bands. And it was the groups I obsessed over more than the individuals within them. I’m not sure what that reveals about me.”

  Jennifer Ziegler

  “Fran Tarkington of the Minnesota Vikings.”

  Jenny Moss

  “I was infatuated with 80’s soul singer Terrence Trent Darby.”

  Bethany Hegedus

  “Glenn Close.”

  Mariko Tamaki

  “I didn’t have one. I was too busy crushing on people in my immediate vicinity. I’ve always been practical that way.”

  Stacey Jay

  “Johnny Depp from 21 Jump Street.”

  Gretchen McNeil

  “Patrick Duffy. I remember seeing him emerge from the ocean in The Man from Atlantis, and even though I wasn’t ready to admit that I was gay, I knew that I was attracted to this man.”

  Michael Griffo

  “Mark Hamill, a.k.a. Luke Skywalker.”

  Katherine Longshore

  “They were all fictional. Laurie of Little Women and Aragorn of The Lord of the Rings. Carlton Buell from the Beany Malone books. Jed Wakeman in Emily of Deep Valley…”

  Mitali Perkins

  “David Bowie.”

  Mari Mancusi

  “Jessica Rabbit.”

  Josh A. Cagan

  “I had a thing for Judd Nelson’s character in The Breakfast Club. He was witty and dangerous and smarter than everyone, though he was a total underachieving bad boy.”

  Amy Kathleen Ryan

  “Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones.”

  Sara Zarr

  “I guess it would have been Elizabeth Taylor—or maybe Annette Fabre, whom I fell in love with during grade school after seeing her in Disney movies—before she grew up in Beach Blanket Bingo. Something about girls—and women—with dark hair and soulful looks in their eyes attracted me more than the blondes most guys swooned over.”

  Joseph Bruchac

  “Joni Mitchell.”

  Daniel Ehrenhaft

  “Jordan Catalano. Does he count as a celebrity? I didn’t even like Jared Leto, I just wanted to date Jordan Catalano. I had a thing for brooding, wounded birds.”

  Robin Benway

  “John Cusack. And some things never change.”

  Beth Fantaskey

  WHO NEEDS LUCK?

  Stacey Jay

  Dear Teen Me,

  In the past few years, you’ve dated more than your fair share of creeps, and attended more than your fair share of funerals, and the road will only get bumpier from here on out. You are the opposite of lucky, my girl, so it’s a good thing you have friends. Without them, you might not be around to write this letter.

  You’re seventeen and you’re doing a LOT of dumb, dangerous things. Aside from drinking and drugging and driving your girlfriends to parties where you step over toothless addicts to get to the door, you have your own secret brand of crazy. You climb out on the roof and walk the ridge at night, letting your toes dangle off the edge. You have a stash of twenty-dollar bills under the ashtray in your car, and sometimes you get a few hundred miles into running away before you come back.

  Sometimes you want to talk to an adult about how alienated and confused you feel, but you’re afraid your parents and teachers and church leaders will hate you. You have a wonderful family, a solid community, and people who support your artsy-fartsy tendencies and think you’ve got potential, kid. You don’t think you deserve to be so miserable.

  But misery isn’t something you have to earn. Misery is misery. It just is. I know what’s going on inside of you, and…I wish I could say that you’re not seeing things clearly, and that the world will be shiny and wonderful when you’re grown up, but I can’t, because it won’t.

&nbs
p; I can, however, offer hope.

  In a few years, with the help of a liberal college staffed by amazing teachers, you’re going to realize it’s your society that’s sick and twisted, not you. You’re going to break free of the conditioning of your conservative, Southern Baptist childhood and declare yourself a feminist, an atheist (later an agnostic), and an independent. You’re going to stop starving yourself to be “pretty;” you’re going to teach yoga and volunteer and realize that parts of your spiritual upbringing were dead on—it is a blessing to serve others, and far better to give than to receive.

  And the seeds for a self-destruction-free future are already being sown right here, right now, in the midst of all the craziness, and being protected by the most amazing support group you’ll ever have, a fierce gang of guardians you completely take for granted. Because surely everyone has friends like these. Friends who stand up for you and to you and call you on your bullshit. Friends who stay up late talking about religion, politics, love, pain, and what it means to be human. Friends who enjoy the good times together, and get each other through tough times, too. Friends who drink hard but love harder; who stand together and protect each other and refuse to ever leave a friend behind.

  Your friends save your life every day. Not only by taking care of you when you do stupid things, but by letting you take care of them. They’re teaching you how to love and play and think for yourself. They’re teaching you that kinship isn’t only forged by blood. Slowly but surely, through the love they give, they’re making up for all the luck you lack.

  But who needs luck when you have such very good friends?

  Years will pass and you’ll fall out of touch with most of these girls, but you’ll never forget them, and you’ll wish every day that you could go back and give each one a tight hug and a big thank you.

  So why don’t you go do that now? Tell them it’s from both of us.

  Stacey Jay is the author of Juliet Immortal (2011) and Romeo Redeemed (2012) as well as several other books for young adults. She lives in Sonoma County, California, with her husband and two boys. Visit StaceyJay.com.

  SEIZURES

  Carrie Jones

  Dear Teen Me,

  Okay, a lot of people write about their health problems. And I get that. I mean, a lot of people like to talk about their broken bones and gastrointestinal issues, and whatever. That’s fine. During flu season, people will go into graphic details about how they puked every two minutes. They’ll even revel in details about the consistency of their vomit—and trust me, whether it was acidic or chunky, it was definitely gross.

  You’ve never been one of those people, though. It’s not that you think sickness shows some kind of bodily or spiritual weakness or something like that. You just think it’s boring. And as far as you’re concerned, there’s nothing worse than being boring.

  So when you were super little and broke your ankle playing tag at Debbie Muir’s house, you didn’t talk about it. And when you were in second grade and you broke your front tooth, you didn’t talk about that either. You even kept your chronic bronchitis a secret.

  And now?

  I guess the older you—that is to say, me—is sticking to the plan. Because writing isn’t talking, technically speaking. But I still feel this weird sort of apprehension, of nervousness. A little voice inside my head keeps telling me, “Sickness is boring. Tell a joke, Carrie. Tell a joke.”

  But seizure jokes are terrible, evil things. These are from Epilepsy.com:

  Do you know what to do if someone has a seizure in a swimming pool?

  Throw in the laundry.

  What’s blue and doesn’t fit. A dead epileptic.

  There are some that are even worse, but I’m not going to include them here because I’m nice like that. So, you’re probably wondering why I’m even telling you seizure jokes.

  Well, in about a month, a boy is going to do something horrible to you. The incident and its aftermath will haunt you for a really long time, and it will affect your life in ways that you’ll never expect. One of those unfortunate, life-changing consequences includes a case of mono—but, worse still, the virus that causes mono is going to act a little funny in your case. It’s going to attack your brain. And it’s going to give you seizures.

  DO NOT FREAK OUT!!! Things I know:

  You’re about to go to college.

  You don’t have time for this.

  You don’t even like to talk about being sick—because being sick is boring.

  And I’d like to be able to tell you that it’s going to be okay. I wish that this letter could actually somehow reach back in time and grab hold of you there—so that you could avoid that party, so that you could escape being hurt by that boy, and so that you wouldn’t have to suffer through seizures every day of your freshman year. But I can’t tell you that. Things don’t work that way.

  Other things that are unpredictable:

  Boys at parties.

  Your friends at parties when your friends are wasted.

  Seizures.

  So, um, the points here are:

  You’re about to experience something truly awful. Even though you don’t drink, a certain very cruel, very callous guy is drinking—and there’s nothing I can do now to stop that thing from happening.

  One of the lasting effects of this horrible experience is a virus that winds up giving you seizures.

  Do not give up.

  Seriously. That’s the point. DO NOT GIVE UP. You’re going to have seizures. You are actually going to develop a rash as a result of those seizures. The rash is pretty gross. Pack a lot of tights and pants to hide it. The seizures will start with your hand jerking. Then you’ll pass out.

  At one point you’ll pass out when you’re near a cute boy in your philosophy class. He’ll try not to panic, but he’ll also kind of fail. At another point you’ll pass out in your dorm room. And once, you even wind up falling off a ladder at your Othello rehearsal. Sometimes you’ll hit your head. Sometimes you’ll wind up with so many bruises that people will think you’re being abused.

  Sometimes people will say, “Hey, aren’t you the girl who has…”

  They’ll search for an inoffensive word. They’ll usually find it. And you, for your part, will usually just be honest and answer yes. And a lot of those awesome people at Bates College won’t care at all. They’ll still love you despite the fact that you’ve lost IQ points from all the seizures.

  Yes, Carrie, there will be cognitive degeneration. Yes, Carrie, that means you won’t be able to recall recent conversations that well anymore, or class lectures, and you’ll actually have to study.

  Here’s the thing: Your sickness isn’t important. It’s not going to define who you are. You have to be the one to do that.

  Your first seizure will happen at home. You and Joe are hanging on the floor, watching Amazon Women on the Moon—this spoof movie that makes fun of other movies and shows. It’s sort of a bunch of weird skits that feature things like a hero guy fighting against giant spiders, and a first lady who used to be a hooker. Stuff like that.

  You aren’t feeling great. You think it’s the stress. A half-eaten tray of nachos rests on the heavy wooden coffee table in front of you. About four cans of Pepsi linger around the nachos, flip tops open, and almost drained.

  “I’m going to miss you when you go,” Joe says, in between bursts of laughter. He loves the scene where a bunch of naked women walk around doing completely normal things. It’s his favorite scene in the movie.

  “Yeah. Me too.” You stop and correct yourself. “I mean, I’m going to miss you.”

  You scratch at the weird rash down by your ankle. It’s a bizarre array of red dots and circles. It isn’t bright; just sort of looks like faded markers. You hate it because it makes you imperfect. You also hate the idea of leaving Joe, even though you’re super psyched about the future right now, and about getting out of the split-level house with the ugly brown couch. You’re ready to leave the entire town of Bedford, New Hampshire, b
ehind—because it seems to be nothing but rich people (except, that is, for you).

  Joe is the “younger man”—which sounds pretty naughty, but isn’t. He’s a year behind you in school though, so you’ll be going to college first.

  And because it’s one of the weaker scenes in the movie, and because, even though something awful happened at that party, you and Joe are hormonal monsters, you start to make out. Kissing Joe is like kissing sunlight. It energizes you, makes you all shaky inside, like you’re doped up on a caffeine IV or something crazy like that. When you kiss him, you can smell him, and he smells clean, like white soap and Lubriderm moisturizer (which claims to be fragrance-free but totally smells). Your lips seem like they’re magnetized, like they can’t help but be drawn toward his, and everything is right in the world…until IT happens. You’re inhaling that smell when he breaks away and says, “Your lips are kind of dry.”

  “Oh!” you grab for your Pepsi. “Sorry!”

  You remember taking a sip…holding the can…hand shaking in this weird, rhythmical way…Joe grabbing the can, his eyes all soft and concerned…his voice sounding far away. “You okay?”

  That’s all you remember.

  Bruce Link wrote, “Stigma exists when a person is identified by a label that sets that person apart and links that person to undesirable stereotypes that result in unfair treatment and discrimination.”

  The first step comes when people realize that others are different from themselves. They give those differences “labels.” Next, culture determines that those people with certain characteristics are representative of everyone else who shares those characteristics, and a “negative stereotype” develops, which creates an “us vs. them” mentality. Finally, those who have been labeled begin to find themselves discriminated against.