Letter To My Past Self

Letter 1

Dear Becca,

I am writing to you from the future. This is very hard for me to say to you. Your senior year will be one of the hardest years of your life, but don't worry. You will pull through and be stronger. It will definitely be tough and you will feel down all the time, but bear with me.

You will have the best week of your life and be extremely happy, but it won't last for long. A week, to be exact. You will finally kiss and date the boy you had a crush on forever. You will finally have good grades and good friends. But it will all come crashing down. On homecoming day, you will go to a party with your best friend, Matthew, and he will go home within the first hour. You will stay at the party with Matthew's friends. You have one drink. Two. Three. They just keep passing you drink after drink. After that, you will lose count of how many shots you have done, but you reassure yourself by making your acquaintance promise to look after you and keep you safe. He will do just the opposite.

He will drive you back to his house in your car and you will ask him to call Emily, our friend, to pick you up. He tells you she did not pick up, although he will not call her until after. He will tell you that you forgot something in his house and you will be too drunk to ask what you forgot. He will grab your arm and lead you into the house. That is where it happened and I think you got the notion of where this is going. You cannot avoid it, no matter what you do, and that will be okay. It will hurt, very badly. You will pass out for some of it, so you will not be able to stop it. It will all be okay.

Afterward, he finally calls Emily and you run out to the front. She comes and you get in her car. You will not comprehend what happened until later, when you take a bath. You will scrub your body raw, but it won't erase the memories. But that is okay. You will make it through. Emily and, our best friend, Sugene will help you make it through. You will go to your Assistant Principal and ask to leave school to go to a female clinic. In response, she will call the police and your parents. Your family will cry and be upset for a very, very long time. All of your friends will ditch you and everyone will yell profanities at you. You will walk through the halls with your head held high and eyes foggy as people scream horrible things at you. Slut. Whore. Burn in hell. You will delete your social media accounts, because of what people are posting about you. You will drop out of school and do classes at home. You will start to be a recluse and I am telling you to stop. You cannot let it change you.

This experience will make you less trusting and vulnerable. You will learn defense techniques and be able to protect yourself. This will help you not be in an even more dangerous situation. You were able to get away with little physical harm, but the emotional impact of it will burden you. It will relieve itself little-by-little. You will stand even stronger against what is wrong and you will give them hell!

I need to tell you, it is okay to feel out of control. The thing is, you cannot control every aspect of your life and you need to stop thinking that you can. You could not help it. Although, it was not your fault and you cannot change the way society thinks. You can start controlling the things you do by thinking about the possible consequences of those actions you take. You can control the way you drink and who you hang out with. You can, also, be smarter in the things you do. Carry around pepper spray and have a phone charger with you. Be safe and cautious. Maybe it will not be forever; maybe society will actually change the way everyone thinks about the whole ordeal. Maybe people will start raising their sons and daughters to treat others as decent human beings. In the meantime, be smart and help others take back the night.

Most of all, you deserve to be happy. You will blame yourself for a really long time and you need to keep telling yourself that it is not your fault. You will need therapy and medication to help you sleep and function, which is not a bad thing. It will help you get past this affliction and you will start slowly being yourself again. I am not myself yet, but we will be eventually. You will start living your life again and be the loud, bubbly Becca again.

I hope this will help you as it helped me cope with things. Just remember: you will not be as naïve, you will take back the night, and you will be content again. As a famous psychologist, C.G. Jung, once said, "I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become." And you will live by those words.

Sincerely,
Your future self