A Letter to My Seventeen-Year-Old Self

Model answer: Dear Seventeen, You are reading this at the kitchen table at eleven at night, surrounded by highlighters, convinced that the chemistry exam on Thursday will decide the entire shape of your life. It will not. I am sorry to deflate the drama, but I thought you would want to know early. I should also confess that I cannot remember the grade. What I do remember, in vivid detail, is the smell of toast at midnight and your father pretending he had come downstairs for a glass of water when he had plainly come to check you were still alive. He left a plate beside your elbow without a word. You thought it was about the toast. It was never about the toast. Here, then, is what I have learnt, and I promise to keep it short, since you have never enjoyed being lectured. Worrying is a perfectly respectable hobby, but it pays no dividends. The people you consider unimpressive, the quiet ones at the back of the class, will turn out to be the most remarkable company you ever keep. And the thing you are most embarrassed about, the notebook of terrible poems under your bed, is, as it happens, the beginning of everything you will later care about. Please do not rush. I know the future feels like a train you are about to miss, but it runs more often than the timetable suggests, and the scenery on the slower ones is better. One last request: call your grandmother more often than you plan to. She will want to hear about the exam, but she will love even more to hear about nothing at all. With more fondness than you would believe, Yourself, twenty years on