The Surprising Letter That A Mother Found In Her Teenage Daughter’s Drawer

Yes, in some of my quirks I’m typical. The typical teenager. I am fifteen years old and I keep a diary. Today what you read is just a part of it, which, of course, has a lock that’s hidden in a place you’ll never find. At least that’s what I hope and that this opportunity doesn’t come when you go to pack my things, thinking you’re putting my room in order, which is just when I feel the most lost.

If you found him it would be a good reason, certainly the best way for you to become a nefarious mother. Overprotective, cocky and insufferable in just one word. Besides, I think it would only feed your fears, those fears that already make you stay awake some nights or wait for me. Because yes, in my head I see options that you would rule out.

When I was little I asked what was outside, what it was, what it was for. Now, for a teenager like me, the questions are more uncertain, they have to do with my inner self and I stopped asking you because I don’t think you have the answers, at least my answers. That’s why I prefer my friends at this point, with them I can share the complicity of not knowing and the emotion of each new discovery. If you go back thirty years, you will understand what I mean.

When we grow up we forget

It’s something that amazes me about seniors. How quickly they forget that they, too, played pranks, fell in love for the first time, pretended to be sick to skip school, or made a fuss about arriving later.

The battle for independence, to resolve the clash between what people expected and what they wanted, and the price anyone had to pay for either option, in the short or long term. What were you like when you were a teenager?

Furthermore, if the genes that contain this tendency have survived, it is likely that the custom has something adaptive, which makes it easier for each to play its role. That you have your expectations and that I am here to break them, perhaps this is the first exercise of more difficult ones that will surely come and that I will have to face. I think if you explained Darwin’s theory to us like that, there would be fewer people in the world wondering what the hell this man said was so important.

You know, when I was little, in this exercise in self-centeredness that all children do, I thought that the world was a great theater and that people, when I didn’t see them, were all preparing the role they were going to play in front of me. To prove this theory, I often tried to be unpredictable. Even though I really wanted a yummy candy, I rejected it to see how others behaved when I acted unpredictably. My intention was that this type of “Big Brother” ended up confessing everything in the face of despair of seeing all his schemes broken.

In this game of coherence and inconsistency I ended up getting lost many times, more than once a day. Hence the changes in my teenage mood, my resistances and acceptances, of trying to relativize everything and feeling weightless against this feeling that nothing is right and that there is nowhere to hold on. Nothing is foolproof, not even someone who has complete control of everything, because best friends can fail and you can flunk the exams you studied the most for. You can seek your luck, but it is more capricious than the drops that fall from a cloudless sky.

What do I have to do to be good enough?

But the most difficult task growing up has to do with an issue that involves the impotence of my friends and mine as well. I don’t know what else I have to do to be good, accept it. To feel loved and respected. It was a question I saw how it changed my friends and how it changed me. Perhaps the first requirement is to have a perfect body, when it develops in an anarchic way and basically does what it wants and sees fit. You might want to be tall and stuff yourself with yogurt for that, but if genetics has decided that’s not it, it won’t be at all. In other words, that’s when you start to understand the hellish torture of high heels.

You begin to see how much more difficult it is to earn someone’s respect when you’re short, as well as when your peers decide you’re overweight or that you’re running out of pounds. An approach that perfectly fits the curves of women who appear in ads: not too many, not too few, just the right amount.

People who once knew you and recognized you now start treating you like something in you stinks and they do it so radically and so many times that you start to believe it, that there’s something in you that isn’t right, that doesn’t work. Also, whatever you do to fix it seems to get more attention. The truth: you’re a little clumsy and God didn’t make you to wear high heels.

You’d like to ask if anyone knows how to make up for what nature hasn’t given them, or given too much, but you’ve seen how your friends failed, and at that moment what you could least bear in life would be to show yourself more vulnerable, to give any hint that your teasing has some kind of effect on you. If you have anything left, it is to give you a sense of security. It’s another one of the attitudes you have to have to be good, not only to feel safe, but also to look good. This way, you end up giving the impression that you don’t care about anything.

In this profile that is required of teenagers to “enter life”, I also realized that I had to get good grades. Then yes, you would be happy. I also had to make it look like it cost me a lot of effort. But not much. Hardworking yes, but also smart.

At school, people also don’t like those who don’t get good grades, unless the group interprets that it was on their own initiative and not for lack of capacity. If they play the second one, you’re lost. You will become part of the world of zeros on the left, an easy place to get in and very complicated to get out of.

In this sense, 7 and 8 are the best grades, and you shouldn’t raise your hand too much or succinctly answer each question from the teacher. Also, before answering, it’s worth taking a chance and saying something funny to fellow trendsetters, the Influencers , as they call themselves.

Once, in a class, we were taught the normal distribution. It is assumed that many of the natural distributions fit this curve, so there is a higher density around the middle and a lower density around the edges.

I found it very natural, because being on the extremes is always very dangerous. Don’t express emotions or express them too much, never get angry or show it forever. So, if you want to be a teenager and live in peace, the best thing to do is stay in the middle of this curve, where camouflaging yourself among the many is easier. A camouflage, as I said before, where to play the kind of who doesn’t care about anything goes very well.

Here are the end of the pages of my diary that I lost by chance, of course. Saying all that would make me ashamed and that’s why I left you written in the middle of my socks. Like a sheet lost in the middle of the order you try to impose on me, so that you can understand a little of my struggle to find my own order. A task that is not easy, but at the same time it is exciting.

And, of course, I love you, which I never tell you…