Every tear I catch is caught by my future self

A thank you to my future self.

They say to write a letter to your past self and connect with her. The iterations of her as a child, an adolescent, a teenager, even your self two years ago.

My future scripting began in reverse. From a young age, I experienced a ton of suicidal ideation, mostly from feeling too socially awkward to play with other kids and like I was preoccupied with other things, but ones I couldn’t articulate. I hit puberty at age 9 and shot up 5 inches on everyone else. Being a tall, gangly, unattractive elementary and middle schooler did a number on my self esteem.

There were other things happening at home, but on the playground I knew my place was on the outside. I didn’t know if it’d stay that way. But the rejection via negligence, the blind eye to my needs, constantly made me want to die. That much I did know.

I wouldn’t ever actually act on my torture of wanting to die, because I knew that whatever lay in wait for me beyond the grave was just more humiliation. My mom would probably curse me for being “weak” and dying at such a young age because I was left out. Loneliness was a terrible excuse for a cause of death.

I’d stare at the knives in the kitchen drawer, or look off the top of a tall building, and wonder what it’d be like to cut myself, or jump off, or do just about anything drastic enough to end it all. I imagined it playing out in vivid detail, not realizing it might traumatize my psyche further in the future — only wanting respite at that moment. The respite would not actually come through dying, I knew, but through being told my needs weren’t impossible to meet.

“I want to be chosen!” I’d silently scream from the swings every day, crying from unspeakable pain, too young to have hope in anything. I wanted friends. I wanted to belong. I wanted my teachers to not yell at me. I wanted to feel safe emotionally.

At church though, there was hope.

“Jesus loves you.” The pastor always said that. “When everyone else can’t hear you, Jesus weeps with you.” I took his words at face value. I decided to start praying. I decided to start pretending like Jesus was real, next to me, and talk to him about my day when my mommy wouldn’t listen, when teachers yelled at me for being too slow to follow directions, when my best friend moved away one summer without telling me, when my dad and mom fought and I hid in my room wanting for it to stop.

Jesus is my friend, right? I couldn’t see him, nor feel him, but I could subtly hear something in my head that might be him?

Whatever inkling was inside me, it told me if I couldn’t picture Jesus’ face and feel a connection with a foreign man, I could try talking to someone else who could reassure me and wouldn’t invalidate me.

Who was that??

I cried because I didn’t know the answer. I looked around, and there was no one. My world was too small at this point. Where could I have gone at age 9?

I got really sick from wondering. The first time in my memory, I had a fever. It was strep throat, the doctor said, but for me it just felt like being bedridden for 8 days straight. It was preferable to school, because at least my mommy stopped yelling at me and took care of me. I almost didn’t want my sickness to end.

In the shower, I wanted it all to end. I’d never been that sick, nor have I been since. When could I find peace again?

At that time, God felt far. But I believed maybe i was just not smart enough to see him. Maybe I could try another personification.

So I cried and I cried, and I began talking out loud to myself. In another timeline.

“If I survive another 15 years,” I wept, “Will it get better?” A me who was an older sister to the me now, who could hold me properly, who could tell me what I wanted to hear when no one had ever spoken to me that gently and understand my sensitivities and validate them. At that age, I didn’t know what I was doing. But before I knew it, I was sitting on the floor of that tub, sobbing so loud I feared Mother would hear.

“Please stay with me, Crystal,” I cried.

For no one else had been able to diagnose what was “wrong” with me, as everyone said about me. Why did I get my period so early? Why did I always get mad at all my peers? Why did boys run away from me and throw things at me? Why was I such a troubled, sensitive child?

“But maybe someday,” my young mind whimpered, "“I won’t be like this, And maybe someday, it’ll get better. Right? Maybe all I’ll have to do is survive.”

I have no clue wtf I said back, lol. All I know is, I heard something back, deep down, unconscious words, that made me try harder to scale the mountains that dominated my lack of communication.

Every time someone hurts me, I feel that muffled shower scream echo in my mind again. And at age 27, I feel inflamed, at all the times no one stood up for me because no one could, and I refuse to let that ever happen again.

And when someone hurts someone else, I also don’t let my heart stay closed. I crack it wide open, add some discernment and a tongue of gold, and speak life into these conflicts.

I do it all for the child I can never stop picturing every day I live, every moment I breathe, every time I remember how badly I want to be heard. How badly I want to be chosen. How badly I want to be respected, still, even to this day, because I still bear scars from that time. Years of people finding me “too much” have turned into a legacy of me making sure I take up just as “too much” space as I need to feel safe.

*****

Today, I cried in the shower. My booster shot has had me fucked up for 4 days now, and even if the effects have subsided, this and my May 2nd dose have had me the most sick I’ve been in years.

Every time I’ve had a fever (all 7 times in my life), I always feel quite closer to God. And every time I make sure I can hear Him now, with my divination tools. And now, because I understand, He tells me I should continue praying to my future self. For she helps me in a way no one has ever been able to.

So today, I sent up a prayer. A whimper. And because I remember how I in my adult age have been accountable to that past iteration of me, I know she in the future can hold me too. And today, she told me to write this down in this letter. Not for anyone else but me.

At some point, I couldn’t tell if it was shower water on my face or tears. But that just made me feel like it was The Divine all over me, washing away all of my fears and anxieties into a steam of reassurance, wafting up into the Universe and into the Will of God.