When My Younger Self Asked Me for Advice

You would find me not at a desk,
not armed with bullet points or certainties,
but standing barefoot at the edge of a morning,
where light spills slowly
as if the sun itself is still deciding
whether to rise.

You would ask quietly,
the way children ask questions
they already fear the answer to:
What should I do with my life?
How do I not mess this up?
How do I survive what’s coming?

I would look at you—
your restless hands,
your eyes full of unfinished storms,
your heart beating like a bird
that hasn’t yet learned
the sky is not a cage.

And the first thing I would tell you is this:
nothing is as late as it feels.
Time is not a judge with a gavel.
It is an ocean—
sometimes calm, sometimes brutal,
always larger than your panic.

You think you are behind.
You think everyone else received a map.
But most people are walking in fog,
pretending they can see stars
while secretly counting their steps
just to avoid falling.

I would tell you
that confusion is not failure.
It is the soil.
Seeds do not apologize for being buried.

You will try to become acceptable.
You will sand yourself down
to fit rooms that were never built for you.
You will mistake applause for love
and silence for rejection.
Please—
do not confuse being needed
with being known.

There will be days
when you betray your own tenderness
just to feel strong.
You will call it maturity.
It is not.
Strength is staying soft
in a world that profits from your armor.

Listen to your body.
It speaks in weather.
Fatigue is a kind of winter.
Joy arrives like migratory birds—
unannounced, seasonal,
never meant to be caged.

You will fall in love
with people who feel like eclipses—
beautiful, rare,
and temporarily blinding.
Some of them will teach you
what desire sounds like
when it echoes through bone.
Others will teach you
how to leave
without burning down your own house.

When something ends,
do not demand closure.
The universe does not explain supernovas.
It only leaves stardust.

I would tell you
that loneliness does not mean you are unlovable.
Sometimes it means you are early—
standing at a truth
your surroundings have not yet grown into.
Stars are alone for millions of years
before anyone names them.

There will be grief.
Not the dramatic kind at first—
but the quiet accumulation
of almosts and what-ifs,
of conversations you rehearse
with people who have already moved on.
Let grief sit with you.
It is not an enemy.
It is love with nowhere to go.

You will try to outrun fear.
You cannot.
Fear runs on the same legs as hope.
Walk with it instead.
Ask it what it’s protecting.
Most of the time,
it is guarding something fragile
that matters.

You will worry
that your life should look louder by now.
But rivers do not shout,
and still they carve canyons.
Impact does not always announce itself.
Sometimes it moves underground for years
before reshaping everything.

I would tell you
to read slowly,
to love sentences that disturb you,
to keep notebooks not for brilliance
but for honesty.
Write badly.
Write like no one is watching
because no one important is.

You will chase meaning
as if it is a destination.
It is not.
Meaning is a practice—
like breathing,
like returning home after wandering too far
into other people’s expectations.

There will be moments
when the world feels unbearably large,
when news, noise, and cruelty
collapse the horizon.
Look up then.
The same sky that held your ancestors
still holds you.
Your pain is real—
but it is not the center of the cosmos.
That is a relief, not an insult.

I would tell you
that success is quieter than you imagine.
It feels like alignment.
Like waking up without rehearsing apologies
for existing.
Like choosing peace
even when chaos begs for your attention.

You will lose time.
Not waste it—
lose it,
the way one loses keys
or a familiar street.
Be kind to yourself when that happens.
Even planets drift.
Even galaxies collide
and begin again under different names.

One day you will realize
that becoming yourself
is not an upgrade
but a remembering.
You were never empty.
Only distracted.

If you ask me
whether it all works out,
I will smile carefully.
Not because everything becomes easy—
it doesn’t—
but because you grow wider
than the idea of “working out.”
You stop asking life
to justify itself.

In the end,
I would place my hand on your shoulder
the way gravity rests on stars—
firm, invisible, faithful—
and say:

Stay curious.
Stay kind to the parts of you
that don’t make sense yet.
Trust the long arc of becoming.
You are not late.
You are in motion.

And that—
that is how galaxies are born.