A Letter to My Eight-Year-Old Self

Dear small me,

I am 16. You are 8. Don't be sad. School is hard now, but you have good friends in the future. Keep your books. You like reading.

Love,
Big me

Dear small me,

I'm 17 and you are 9. I want to tell you three things.

First, don't worry about your English class. You think you are bad at English, but in three years, you are good. You read books in English. You watch films in English. It is fine.

Second, try to be kinder to your little brother. He is annoying because he is small. One day he is your friend.

Third, I'm proud of you for helping Grandma in the garden. Keep doing that. You will be sad when she's gone, and you will be glad you helped.

Love,
Big me

Dear ten-year-old me,

I'm twenty-three. I'm writing from a small flat in another city, far from where you are sitting right now, in our old kitchen, doing your maths homework with a pencil that is too short.

First, the maths is fine. You think you are bad at it because Miss Williams told you so in front of the class. She was wrong. You will go on to study a subject with quite a lot of maths in it, and you will be okay.

Second, I want to tell you about Grandad. He is going to be ill quite soon, and you will spend a lot of afternoons sitting with him. You don't know it yet, but those afternoons are some of the most important hours of your whole childhood. Listen carefully to his stories. Ask him about his sister. He has more to say than anyone realises.

Third — be kinder to yourself. You are a serious, worried child. That's okay. You become a serious, less worried adult.

With love,
Twenty-three

Dear small me,

It's a Tuesday in October and I'm twenty-six and I'm writing this on the bus to work. You are ten and you are at home with a cold, watching daytime television, and you don't yet know how lucky you are to be allowed not to go to school for a day.

The first thing I want to tell you is that you are not, in fact, going to be a vet. I'm sorry. You are going to be quite bad at biology. The good news is that the same instinct — wanting to look after things — turns out to fit a different job, which you don't even know exists yet. So don't worry too much about your career plans. Most of them are made up of words you haven't learned yet.

The harder thing is about Auntie Maeve. I know she is your favourite. She is mine too. She is going to be ill when you are about thirteen, and she is going to be very brave about it, and you are going to spend a lot of time at her flat because she is the only adult who treats you like a person. Pay attention. Write things down. Ask her about Belfast. You will want this later.

I want to tell you, also, that the letter you are about to write to your future self — you'll do this in school next week, in Mrs Connolly's class, on a piece of yellow paper — is the reason I am writing this one back. It took me sixteen years to answer you. Sorry it's late.

You are doing fine. Keep going.

Me

Dear small me,

It is the third week of October, and I am writing this on the train, which is, predictably, late. You are eight, sitting on the carpet of the front room, doing your reading homework with your finger under each word, the way Mrs Hill has taught you. The radiator is making the small, particular click that means it has just come on. I want to begin with that sound because everything I am about to say will be more abstract.

I am aware that the form I have chosen has its dangers. Letters to younger selves are now a small industry. They are usually disappointing, because their writers want to come out of them looking wise. I have no special wisdom to offer; what I have is information, and a little time.

The information is this. Granny is going to die when you are ten. I won't soften it. You will be told late, after she is already in hospital, because the adults will not be sure how to tell you. The lateness will be the part that hurts. By the time you understand what has happened, the funeral will have happened too, and you will not have been there. I think the people who made that decision were trying to protect you. I think they were wrong. If you have any influence — and you don't, but suppose — ask to be told earlier. Ask to come.

I was going to tell you, also, about school, but I find I have written the harder thing first and I no longer have the heart for the smaller one. School gets better. The friends are coming. That is enough.

I want to say one more thing. You are going to be a careful, slightly worried person. Not all of that is bad. The carefulness becomes a kind of competence. The worry becomes harder to put down. Both will be with you for a long time. Please be patient with both of them. They have been with you since before you remember, and they have, in their own way, kept you safe.

I love you. I'm sorry I can't post this.

Big me

Dear small me,

It's a Wednesday in late February, the light is going from the kitchen, and I have been sitting at the table with a notebook for about forty minutes pretending to write this letter. I have already drafted, and abandoned, three openings. The first was philosophical and pleased with itself. The second tried to be funny and was not. The third was straightforwardly sentimental, in a way that I would, if you read it back to me, find embarrassing. I am telling you about the discarded openings partly because they are honest information about what writing this letter is like, and partly to slow myself down before I say anything that matters.

Let me describe the room you are in, while we are at the level of detail the letter can manage. You are eight, you are sitting on the carpet of the front room, and you are doing the thing you used to do — I had forgotten about it until just now — where you line up your felt-tip pens by colour, in a particular order that only you understand, and that you can re-establish, if anyone disturbs them, in about six seconds. The radiator is making the small click that it makes when it has just come on. Mum is upstairs, on the phone, in the voice she uses when she does not want you to hear what she is saying. You can hear it anyway.

The genre I have chosen for this letter — the open letter to a younger self — has, by now, hardened into a recognisable thing. I have read enough of them in magazines to know what they generally do. They reassure. They look back from a position of arrival. They tell the small reader that the kids who were unkind became dull and that the parents who seemed distant were in fact 'doing their best'. I have nothing against reassurance, in principle. I have a lot against the version of it in which the writer pretends to know more than they do, and the past is rearranged, retrospectively, into a story whose moral is: it was all worth it. I am not eighteen and I am not yet able to say it was all worth it. I do not yet know what the it was, exactly, or whether the worth has been determined.

What I can tell you is something the genre would not let me tell you cleanly, and that is this. Granny is not going to die when you are ten, the way I half-feared she would when I was your age. She is going to live to ninety-three. She is going to be cogent until she is ninety-one. You are going to spend more time with her than any other adult in your family, and a great deal of what you become will be downstream of those afternoons in her flat. When she eventually dies, the version of you who is at her funeral will know — because of these afternoons — what to say to your father, who will not know. Pay attention now. Ask her about the dance hall in Salford. Write down the names she uses for her sisters. Some of this letter is just instructions for things you should pay attention to, and the rest is just affection.

I want to correct something I said earlier. I said I had nothing against reassurance in principle. That is not quite true. I have, on reflection, considerable resistance to being reassured by people who were not present at the events being reassured about. The reassurance that is worth having is the kind that comes from someone who knows what they are reassuring you for, and who is staying. That is the form of reassurance Granny gives. That is, I think, what I am trying to give you in this letter, with the obvious limitation that I cannot stay in your eight-year-old afternoon. I can only stay in mine, and try to keep you company across the gap.

The felt-tip pens are still in the order you put them. The light has gone from the kitchen. Mum has come off the phone. I love you. I am proud of you. I am sorry I cannot post this. Carry on.

With love,
Me