5/17/2017

Dear 10 year old me,
Your life is probably going pretty well right now. I bet that hanging out with all of your friends must be pretty fun. Middle school is coming up for you and during that time, life is easy. Your life is about to get harder though. I’m not here to make your life hard and scary, I’m here to warn you so you can have a better life in the future.
Your life is amazing. Don’t let that slip away from you. Right now you have all of the friends in the world. Hanging out with Alex is super fun and it’s going to be for a long time, all the way through middle school. You will make a lot of friends during middle school, but then suddenly lose all of them. The people in band will slowly start to talk to you less because you didn’t do marching band. You don’t have to do it to keep these friends. You will make some new ones. You will join a sport called cross country. Now, if you choose to continue to do this sport all four years of your high school career, that’s fine, but please make sure that you hang out with the right people. These people should make you feel good about yourself, not constantly make fun of you while you suppress your rage.
This is a huge topic. You haven’t heard of this word, but you have something called emetophobia. This words stands for the fear of throwing up. Now, you don’t really have emetophobia in the worst case, but you do have it. It only comes up when you are actually around someone who threw up. Just know that you have lots of people who can help you with this problem, like your mom and all of your teachers. One thing that I need you to do is tell your mom about this right now. Tell her that you’re scared of emetophobia. THe reason I’m asking you to do this is because I have no idea why we are both scared of it. If you don’t tell tell someone, then you are going to have a very bad 2016. You’re emetophobia will get so much worse. You won’t be able to eat, you’ll start to lose weight, you always have to look up facts about every food before you eat it. It’s awful. I don’t want you to go through this. That’s why I need you to tell a therapist about this. At a younger age, problems like this are much easier to solve, so if you go and talk to a professional, you’ll be saving both of us at the same time. I need you to do this.
Now, relationships probably don’t seem to important to you. You’re probably in that mindset where you think girls have cooties, but it’s not true. When you go to middle school, a girl named Annika will ask you to be her boyfriend. Don’t say yes. I know that this sounds really mean, but, because this is your first relationship, it’s not a good one to be in. Nothing ends up happening and you break up after only 2 weeks of dating. That love that you had isn’t real. This relationship will get you thinking that you need to be in one to be happy This is wrong. You can survive school without a relationship. I’m not saying don’t date anyone, but make sure that you make the right choice about who you spend your time with.
Thank you for reading this, 10 Year Old Me. Please take all of these topics into consideration.

Yours truly,
Johnathan