Much of my life I’ve felt a little like I had an ongoing correspondence with myself at various ages — my teen self wrote letters to my older self, my older self found those letters in journals and wrote back. I imagined myself sending less formal bits of encouragement back and forth to myself through the years, too, and some part of me half-believed those messages could be heard, and make a difference.
And on one level, of course, writing YA fiction is all about holding conversations with your teen self.
So when Emily Kristin Anderson asked me to write a letter to my teen self for the Dear Teen Me blog, of course I agreed. My letter is up today, complete with a couple bonus pictures of 80s me:
You were right about everything.
Okay, maybe not everything everything. We can debate all the small stuff. But about everything big, everything that mattered, you were right …