Open Letter

"I’m going to tell you something I wish somebody had told me when I was younger and feeling all insanely fucked in the head.

The fact that you feel bad, that you feel discouraged, that you feel afraid and depressed and angry and confused, to feel like you’re going crazy with the shit that surrounds you,

these things are all a sign that there is something right about you. To not feel those things in the face of abuse — both the abuse that’s been done to you and the abuse you have witnessed done to others — would indicate something deeply broken inside you. You are feeling the way that a real, good, solid human being would feel in the face of all that horror.

There is a line from one of my favorite books, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, where a doctor tells her patient something like: Measure all the pain you feel now, the depth of it, the never-ending feeling of it. That’s also your measure for joy. As terrible as you can feel now, surrounded by all this, that’s also how intense your happiness can be when you have a shot at it.

Being young is a hard place to be. There are so few boundaries you have the right to set and enforce. If your parents are hurtful to you, you can’t necessarily get away from them the way you can as an adult. If your peers are horrible shits, you still have to sit in a building with them every day. That can cause such a brutal mindfuck, because you are trying to hold on to what you firmly believe is right and yet you are forced to interact daily and often obediently with people you firmly believe are wrong, often with nobody supporting you or backing you up.

It never helps at the time, but I’ll tell you that it’s true that things will get better. The more and more independence you achieve, the more you can set and enforce those boundaries, and the less you will need somebody to support you or back you up. Horrible shit will still be going on in the world, but you can make the decision whether you feel safe enough to let it be a part of your life.

You’re going to be all right. Give yourself time, give yourself compassion, give yourself the permission to feel fucked-up without thinking that you are fucked-up. But you are going to be all right."

- Harriet Jacobs on Fugitivus