Recently, I’ve been thinking about a question I often see posed in celebrity interviews or on reflective blogposts: “If you could say one thing to your younger self, what would it be?” Perhaps I’d urge the 18-year-old me to be more confident, and reassure her that whatever it is will be OK in the end.
But truthfully, in the hypothetical scenario where an 18-year-old me finds a letter from her future self, the message would most likely simply read: “So long, sucker!”
I’m just not old enough to look back on 18-year-old me with any real distance. The teenager formerly known as Coco is not a faded memory whom I can objectively observe. She is an annoyingly near version of myself, whom I am driven to improve upon. I’m still paying for her mistakes (three words: Topshop store card); I am probably still in a bit of competition with her. If my former self were in a queue, I would definitely pretend I knew a random stranger near the front, just so I could be ahead of her.
Yet there are many attributes of Myself the Younger that I actively resist growing out of. It’s probably why, last week, for the first time in years, I found myself at a rave. An actual rave! You know the sort, with the flashing lights, heavy bass and sense of foreboding throughout?
Maybe that last one is just me. But still, it would suggest some inevitable change is occurring. I’m fairly certain my 18-year-old self didn’t sit in silence hours before any big night out wrought with anxiety about queues, lack of loo roll and the price of water (£7!).
If the question was inverted, and my teen self could send present-day me, sitting in the corner of the rave, a message, I guess she would say: “See you later, loser!”
