When I Was 17

When I was 17, I wrote a time capsule letter to myself using FutureMe and scheduled its arrival for ten years into my future – one day before my 28th birthday. That was last month. I’ve also been reading my old notebooks, blog posts, unpublished drafts, and drunken scrawls.

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March 27, 2010

It was evidence of an unworldly creative soul, grappling with a lot of unprecedented pain, particularly around 2011-2014. Could pain be described as self-inflicted if it is largely induced by one’s ego? Maybe. On the other hand, we are not our mental illnesses.

Depression creeps up on you like a fog, seeping into your eyes and lungs, slowly enough to not be noticed. In the darkest depths of it, you lose the wherewithal to reach out for help – although, in the moment, it has you convinced you don’t need it. It’s a possession, really.

Coupled with the fact that moving out of home and across state-lines to a big city with glamorous ambitions, while being catapulted into an adulthood suffering under the boot of late-stage capitalism, was more than enough to send any young person spiralling out of control, my first four or five years into adulthood undeniably broke me down.

In hindsight, it’s exactly what I needed.

I’m very grateful of the fact that I was an active blogger in my teens. Looking back, I wrote with a force of personality I was too shy to manifest in real life. That was probably for the best.

Evidently, I was a stubbornly ambitious girl who, after a childhood of living with a mild case of Gifted Child Syndrome, plus this generation’s upbringing of “Believe in Yourself and You Can Do Anything” and “Do What You Love” bullshit, was about to get a very rude awakening. Naïvely, I aspired to be a budding young filmmaker living a cosmopolitan life. Actually, only part of that sentence is naïve.

When I was 18, I moved to Sydney to attend film school. It’s not naïve to aspire to be a filmmaker. You don’t even need to go to school – you just need a camera and the courage to hit record. But I wanted to be a budding filmmaker, living a “cosmopolitan life”.

My teenaged aspirations came with an entitlement to a dizzying level of success that I invested more creative energy into imagining, rather than actual creative content. I had dreams of boasting an intimidatingly impressive body of work before the age of 30, with many laurels to my name, plus a luxurious but quirky Manhattan lifestyle. It’s hilariously humbling to look back on.

Fantasies like that made me feel powerful but were ultimately incompatible with reality. My landlord wasn’t going to wait for me to monetise my creativity. Film school, while fun, was just the tip of the iceberg of what I now know is an arena fraught with privilege that is subtle in its cruelty at best, fundamentally exploitative and transactional at worst. Ironically, working in show business crippled my desire to create – something that once brought me so much joy that I happily detached myself from developing a reliable set of social skills – and it wasn’t long before all my energy was channelled into the acquisition of the Almighty Dollar, just so I could survive. My story certainly is not unique.

By the end of 2014, I went from being hellbent on achieving this glamorous life in show business, rejecting the prospect of becoming a “normie” working 9 to 5 for The Man, to being in a soul-crushingly endless pursuit for entry-level jobs into anything arts/entertainment-adjacent. What happened in between? I think I died a very slow death, the cause being a combination of a severe identity crisis, a quarter-life crisis, and an unmedicated mental illness crisis.

A new girl woke up one evening in October 2014. In the middle of dinner, it hit me: “I feel peaceful”. This was a couple of weeks after starting Lexapro. My reality suddenly became noticeably less foggy, so I was finally able to see how, on top of the motivational paralysis that depression had burdened me with, my unacknowledged bad habits and attitudes enabled me to self-sabotage at every turn, both personally and professionally. It took a couple more years after that before I began to be more compassionate to myself, while also opening myself up to brutally honest truths, all of them to do with my relationship with power.

Despite my parents’ income, I grew up quite spoiled. So much so that I didn’t realise it and worst of all, I became used to it. Also, further to the Gifted Child Syndrome note earlier, good grades and adulation came to me almost at will. Real life didn’t give me what I wanted, when I wanted it, and so I lost my goddamn mind. Only this time, real life did not capitulate because I sulked. It let me suffer, and I needed to. It forced me to be open to change, something I am notoriously resistant to. I’m very grateful that I now have the clarity of mind to remind myself that every time I’ve leaned into change, even if it’s uncomfortable, it’s been for the better. It’s like being injected with a vaccination.

Another harsh truth is that I believe I have attachment and/or abandonment issues. This is a whole other conversation for another time, possibly with a professional, but I believe this has influenced every relationship I’ve ever had, only the consequences of it are made clear to me in adulthood. It’s made me realise that I can be emotionally abusive when I feel powerless. Sometimes I question the validity of my asexuality with this in mind.

My ego was always my biggest obstacle, although I would love to throw money or mental illness under the bus. No doubt they are huge pain points but my biggest enemy has always been myself. Had I been considerably less narcissistic, perhaps I would have asked for help sooner, or been more open-minded about who or what made me happy. I could have been focusing on who I actually was, rather than who I was “supposed” to be. Although the relationship is precarious, I like to think I coexist with my ego a bit better now.

I mentioned at the start that I’d sent a FutureMe letter to myself when I was 17, due to arrive on my 28th birthday. Unfortunately, that letter never arrived. Not because the website is obsolete – it’s still up and running smoothly after all these years – but because of something hilariously stupid. I forgot to confirm my email when I first sent it to myself, all those years ago. The confirmation email, I imagine, landed in my Junk Mail box, forever ignored until autodeleted by Hotmail, and so my time capsule letter evaporated into nothing.

It’s laughably poetic, really. I pinned so many expectations on that one letter – there’s been a decade’s worth of anticipation – only to be faced with the reality that I almost literally have to let go of the past.

It doesn’t matter what was in that letter. I distantly remember that life and that person, like a bad hangover, and frankly she has no place in my present nor my future. In all those journal entries, blog posts, etc, I would sometimes write about how I wish I could revive or unearth the Old Me. I know now that that wouldn’t be a good idea, but not because I believe she was a bad person. When I was 17, I was starry-eyed, spirited, purposeful, determined, and proud. I’m still some of those things, and a lot of other new adjectives, too. But I don’t really care for those kind of simplistic one-word descriptors anymore. Who I am today, how I feel today, can be boiled down in a rather comically dismissive way, but I absolutely feel it with every fibre of my being: I’m trying my best.