Does life really get better after being a teenager? It feels horrible right now, does it really get better?
It’s hard to imagine a joy you haven’t experienced, or a future beyond an unhappy present. As a kid I didn’t think I’d be alive at this age, never mind happy and thriving, and yet here I am.
Still, though, looking back, I can’t think of any way of saying or proving that in a way my younger self would have believed, and not dismissed as a shallow and meaningless platitude- and so I struggle to come up with a way of convincing you.
Telling someone it gets better feels like describing a colour that only you can see; you can only speak vaguely and poetically, with metaphors and similes, and nothing you say can ever truly do it justice.
And even if you want to believe me, even if you put all your faith in what I say, there will be part of you that won’t. Maybe now, maybe in a year, maybe on a very bad day- if you are anything like me, you will doubt it, and it will feel as though something is wrong with you specifically- like you as an individual are uniquely destined for pain or emptiness.
So I won’t say it will be better. What I will say, though, is a hard truth that is easier to swallow:
It will hurt. It will be hard. It will take a very long time, in quick little sprints and long, agonizing slogs. Some days or weeks or months will make the good days feel like a cruel lie, and on the better ones you will convince yourself that you’ve freed yourself forever from the hurt, only to feel foolish when the hurt comes back.
But slowly, like getting taller or older or growing out your hair; like leaving an old shirt out on a fence post in the sun, it will change. You will learn, you will heal, and you will grow. Another simile to describe a colour in a spectrum you can’t see: like a tree that grows around a chain and swallows it whole, you will keep growing, until the chain is dwarfed by what you have become.
It does not get better for everyone.
Not every tree becomes a giant.
The trick is to keep growing, keep persisting, teaching yourself to heal, reaching for the sun. Letting the rot at your feet feed you instead of seeping wetly under your skin. Reach out to those who you admire and respect who want to see you grow as well. Let the shrapnel lodged in your heart rust off at both ends, and let it chip and warp and splinter whatever saw or axe comes along to chop you down.
The hurt gets smaller when you grow around it, but to get there, you must grow. And growing is slow, and boring, and hard.
So, yes. It can get better. But you will have to find the strength to see it happen.