Sometimes beauty exists only in shadow.
“As an author, I write to that broken place in myself, knowing that I wasn’t alone then, and all of the things I was struggling with haven’t been resolved – which means there are oodles of teens still battling those very same issues, and still with no validation or acknowledgment of their struggles.”
– Neesha S. Meminger, author of SHINE, COCONUT MOON
Last month, author Sarah Mlynowski did a bit of Twitter PR for her new novel Gimme a Call, and challenged YA authors she knew to tweet a message to their high school selves. The answers she received were amusing, poignant, and thought-provoking. Colleen’s feature this month at Chasing Ray’s What A Girl Wants takes the question a step further: which books did your high school self need to read?
I thought it amusing that none of us listed a Francesca Lia Block book, none of us mentioned Franny & Zoey, and none of us mentioned and Judy Blume or Norma Fox Mazer. Maybe that’s ’cause we were already reading those during our senior year?
What would you send back in the time machine to Sixteen/Seventeen-year-old you?
What I really wish I could give my sixteen or seventeen year old self is an easy guitar book and a note that said, “Never mind what Joan Jett said. Learn to play acoustic guitar” (because that was what we had in the house). I think I would have found a steady center a lot sooner had I enabled myself to play music.
I would send a copy of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. To it, I would attach a note: “Do what you’re bad at. That’s how you learn.”
I would also have to send myself Mary Oliver’s poem “The Journey” to tell my lost self to step forward and “save the only life that you could save.”