Our Letters to Younger Selves

We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased…

Dear Zoë Catherine,

You are 15, in the middle of a long winter. You are lonely and you feel like a stranger in your changing body.

You go to bed praying that you will wake up with your old body, twelve pounds lighter.

You want to sleep all day and you refuse your breakfast before school.

You don’t know how to live in this new body or this new world where you are a woman, not a girl, where men blow you kisses through the car window, and where airbrushed women with sunken cheeks and vacant eyes stare at you from billboards and magazines.

You are wondering how to be whole and how to be happy and how to hold onto your girl self and let her go at the same time.