Dear 18 year old Laura,
You have just finished school and are ready to set off to
university. It is all you’ve ever wanted and you can’t wait to make your mark
on the world. You’ve decided you want to be a lawyer, and the summer work
experience placement where you looked after the partner’s baby for 3 weeks hasn’t
put you off!
You’ve just split up with your high school boyfriend after 3
years. You’re ‘heartbroken’ for about a week and then you realise that you’re
probably better off. I am sorry to say that you have not known real heartbreak
yet – this will come a few years later. But we’ll get to that in a bit…
You probably want me to tell you that you’ll ace uni, get a
first class degree and end up working for a prestigious law firm where you’ll
make a real difference. Sorry, it doesn’t quite pan out that way. You’ll
struggle. School and exams came naturally to you but at uni, everyone is
clever, and you’ll never really feel like you’re good enough. You’ll get
mediocre grades and will struggle through, and leave feeling a little bit lost.
When you’re 19, you’ll move to Glasgow and have a couple of amazing
years living with friends in the West End. You’ll drink far too many
cosmopolitans, date inappropriate men, and watch a lot of Grand Designs. [A bit
of advice – I know your tax class is at 9am but you might want to go to that.
It’s going to come in handy…]
When you’re 20 you will meet someone special – ‘the one who
got away’ as it were. But you’ll be too messed up emotionally to make a go of
it and you’ll treat him terribly and never really recover from the guilt. And
only then will you face real heartbreak, for the love that never quite ran its
course.
You will spiral in to a depression which almost results in
you failing your third year at uni. You’ll sit in an exam hall and write nonsense
because you don’t know the first thing about Roman Law. Gran will drag you to
the GP, where you won’t admit that you’ve been formulating plans to slit your
wrists and end it all, and you’ll take the meds and wear your fake smile and
you’ll just about manage to pass the course and be allowed to go back for
honours year.
I’d love to tell you that it gets easier, that those pills
will make everything better. But the truth is you will struggle with your
mental health for many years to come. It will take almost 10 years for you to
get a real grip on it. You will suffer many panic attacks where you convince
yourself that you are dying. You will show up at A&E more than once, only
to be told that you’re not actually having a heart attack. You’ll feel like you’re
going mad. But you’ll function enough to not let it show most of the time. Years
later, a friend will say ‘But you were always so smiley, I had no idea.’ You
will absolutely perfect the art of ‘faking it til you make it.’
But you will
graduate. Unfortunately, it’s at a time where there are no jobs. So that traineeship
that you’re after isn’t going to happen for you. But it all works out in the
end and believe me, one day you will look back and thank your lucky stars that
you didn’t become a solicitor.
When you’re 21 you will fall in love with the man you will
eventually marry. Yes, I know it’s hard to believe that you will settle down one
day – you thought you’d live like Carrie Bradshaw forever – but you’ll find your
way to suburbia like the best of them. You’re going to move to Uddingston. You
don’t even know where that is right now!
The man you’ll marry is a good egg. He will sweep you off
your feet. He will save you. You will have a few tough years where your mental
health issues get in the way. You won’t think you deserve the happiness that he
offers, and you’ll subconsciously try and sabotage it with the crazy behaviour
that you’ve always exhibited in relationships before. But he’ll stick around
and one day it will click. You’ll realise, that actually, you want the good life.
You want to be happy with this person forever. You can’t lose this…
…When you’re 26, you will stand on a beach pavilion in the Caribbean,
the waves crashing behind you, and you’ll say the vows that you’ll agonise over
for days the week before and you will mean every single word. From then on, the
path to happiness comes easily for you. You will be the picture perfect cliché of
marital bliss.
Eventually, after a rocky start to your career, you will
find a job that you love and that you’re actually good it. And you know those
tax lectures you didn’t go to? Well you’ll stand in front of a lecture hall
full of students and deliver one of those lectures. You’ll spend many years
studying. In fact, by the time you pass your final Chartered Tax Advisor exam,
you’ll have been sitting exams for nearly half your life. But one day you’ll be
done and you’ll go to the House of Lords, where you’ll be presented with a certificate
that will hang proudly on your home office wall for many years to come.
In 2016, when you’re 28 years old, you will suffer a mental
breakdown. You will work too hard and not look after yourself and you will fall
apart for about three months. You will lock yourself in your bathroom and you
will pull off your own skin in an attempt to get rid of the bugs that you believe
are crawling over your skin. You will hit rock bottom.
But you will discover mindfulness, which isn’t even a thing
yet, and you’ll slowly get better. You’ll develop the coping techniques that I
know will get you through the rest of your living days and you’ll come out the
other end better for it, finally, after all these years, self-aware enough to
know that life is too important to suffer in silence.
I wish there was more advice I could offer you. I wish I
could paint a happier picture of your 20s. I’m happy to say that your group of friends
will still be your best friends 10 years later, and you’ll add some new friends
to the mix too, which makes you luckier than most. But there’s other tough
times ahead that I haven’t even mentioned. Illness will destroy your family.
The world will become an increasingly scary place.
The truth is, you shouldn’t want to change anything. These
experiences will shape you in to the confident 30 year old that you always knew
you’d become eventually. So when times are tough, just have a little faith. You
will somehow get through it all. Every one of your worst days will fade in to
the background eventually. Keep fighting - you’ve got this.
Love from your (almost) 30 year old self.
xx
