EMILY SULLIVAN

august 1, 2021

 

where i’m at currently, a letter to my future and past self.

 

dear emily,

 

this is your future self writing to you about eight or nine months later. i’m not here to update you, or maybe i’ll put that as a later entry on this blog thing, but you’re 21 now and i want to tell you and anyone else reading this, some things that i’ve learned from this life. hell, maybe just from the past year since it might’ve been your most eventful yet painfully beautiful year on this earth thus far. without further ado, here are important things that i can’t tell you enough times.

 

1. listen to your gut. listen to your gut because it’s important. God put us on this earth to be our own person and while the outside world has a really good way of letting us forget who that person is, our gut doesn’t. listen to your gut. if you don’t want to hangout with that boy, don’t. tell him kindly that you just aren’t ready to put yourself out there at the moment. if you don’t want to do the hard thing just because of the other person, do it anyways because it’ll just be harder in the long run. listen to your gut, i beg of you.

2. pay attention to who you’re around when you feel your best. the past year, give or take a few months, has been filled with people surprising me left and right. people that i thought would never do me wrong, have done me wrong. people that i thought would never be important to me, are important to me now. there truly is a reason for everything. like i said above, listen to your gut and trust it when it doesn’t have a good feeling about a person because odds are, it’s right. you’ll continue to figure this out and it’ll be sad to some of the people who you thought were important, leave. but know that there will always be the few who make you feel your best.

3. if it’s meant to be, it will be. i think that this reminder is something that my 20th year on earth really taught me. quickly into turning 20 years old, the loving boyfriend that i thought i had, took advantage of me and got a dui in my car while i was asleep. i kept telling myself that if it weren’t meant to be, it would be clear to me. yet, a boy still stole my car and got arrested in it all while i was sleeping and i still didn’t think that it was meant to be for us to break up. you know when we broke up? one random saturday night sitting my couch drinking red wine and playing cards. and he broke up with me. listen to your gut. if they’re meant to be in your life, they will be. this past year has taught me that life is truly out of your  control. as much as we try to make it in our control, it’s not. do you know how badly i wanted to stay friends with the one person that i thought would never leave? pretty bad. did i apologize legitimately over 100 times? yes. did she ever decide to forgive me? no. and that’s okay. you take what you learn and trust your gut that if it were meant to be, it would be. she was a friend that was meant for me in that time of my life and i’m so grateful for that because it wouldn’t have led me to the people that are meant to be in my life forever. people who you get matching tattoos with.

4. be proud of yourself. please, be proud to be emily sullivan and whoever you are reading this, be proud of yourself. i know for you, or myself or whatever tense this is being written in, you’re really hard on yourself. you’re hard on yourself in all the wrong ways. you don’t take school or money seriously but you take what you think of yourself way too seriously, not the mention the way that other people think of you. think about all of the things in the past year that you have accomplished and learned from. you learned and are still learning how to be okay being alone, that is huge! you finally learned that not everyone is meant to stay forever. you learned that being comfortable is sometimes an uncomfortable thing. you learned that just because people are screaming at you “no” that you can scream back “yes”. you learned that you’re not as strong and bold as you think you are, in a good way. and by that, i mean that you went back to the one person you said you would never go back to, countless times, yet you still know that they’re not meant to be. but you acknowledged the fact that you can’t be as cold and strong as you want to be. in that, you learned that being sad and being vulnerable through that sadness is okay, because you learned from it. i am so proud of you.

5. you are not hard to love. this one kind of, actually very much so, left me speechless because of how mind-blowing it is to know that yeah, you’re right, i am not hard to love. sure, i may be loud and annoying and talk a lot and be bossy and always think i’m right and be a little bit lazy and a little bit too much of a flirt and i might be a little to much of a loud mouth. but i am not hard to love. i am emily sullivan, i am wildly curious and bright and vulnerable and unique and i am so weird. i am so weird in all the ways that make me who i am. there are so many people out there that i haven’t met yet that will love me for who i am. sometimes it keeps me up at night, you know, knowing that there are people and music and moments in life that i haven’t even been close to experiencing that will assure me that i am not hard to love.

 

i think that this is going to be a series of pieces because if i really elaborated on everything i’ve learned in the past year or so, you might just be here for a couple of weeks. but yeah, those are just things that i’ve learned for myself and maybe for you too. hold them close and while you’re at it, give yourself some credit. you’ll never have it all together but i’m pretty sure that’s the beauty of this thing.