Skip to main content

Dear Past Me


Hi 17 year old Ivy. This is your 22 year old version. 5 years older, 50 years wiser. I hope you would be proud of what I have become were you to meet me. Your mind had been so focused on KCSE so I want to just tell you that you did it! You passed. scratch that, you did exceptionally well. What will surprise you more is that there are greater things in life than that exam that was the sole focus of your life for four years.

Remember that 5 -year plan that you had in your journal. The one in which  you planned to have an Actuarial Science degree from UoN in five years time? Well, you almost have that degree, but it will be from Strathmore and not UoN. Maybe you had some sort of premonition about it when you stuck that flier you got at the career fair in your locker. Campus wasn't the rave you expected it to be. I mean, you met some pretty cool people but I sincerely hope that those weren't the best days of your life because that would suck.

In a surprising twist, you fell in love. No, not with HIM. Turns out he wasn't The One. Not unless there's more than one One...  Soon after high school you met a guy who seemed like pretty much everyone else but was refreshingly different once you got to know him. You know how you think that two people in love always work out? How you think that relationships go sore because the two people don't truly love each other? You were wrong. Sometimes love isn't enough. You will get your heart broken at the tender age of 19 and it will hurt like a bitch. But you will get over it. You will date other people before you finally float back to him. You'll learn to forgive, to let someone else see your flaws, and to see past their flaws in return. Spoiler alert: He will not be a starving artist... or a hot shot lawyer.

You still have more or less the same taste in music; the same inability to grasp fashion trends; and the same hunger to read anything and everything. You now blog. Almost everyone does. At some point of campus almost everyone you know will have a blog. You don't write in your journal as much as you used to. It has something to do with a vow that you made to stop making journal entries if they involved nothing more than boy trouble. Yes, at some point in the past 5 years you had become that kind of girl. You watch too many movies and TV Series. You got over Damon Salvatore and currently don't entertain crushes on fictional characters. In fact, you don't even watch Vampire Diaries any more.

All the important things about you are still intact. You have lofty dreams, borderline narcissism, and an infinite ability to forgive yourself. At the moment you are holding these qualities close because life seems so uncertain. Uncertain enough for you to have written a letter to yourself five years into the future so that in 2020 it will remind you how worried you were about the future, only for it to turn out so well (hopefully).

I'll leave you to yourself now. Looking back, I'm glad you are seventeen in 2010. Teenagers these days are so weird. You'd be lost in this decade.

Love,

Future You.


Labels:

Comments

  1. Anonymous12 June 2015 at 02:48

    Your 17 year old self should read this. https://mycluelessthoughts.wordpress.com/2015/06/11/a-mans-tale/

    ReplyDelete
  2. Unknown24 April 2018 at 18:06

    I know you posted this a while ago but this has got to be the greatest coincidence of my entire life. I was just ramaging through the internet trying to find something different and i ran into a fellow Kenyan's blog post i completely relate to. My name is Florence I really enjoyed reading this and the whole time i was smiling and saying "me too" and " yup Damon Salvatore was a phase at some point in time" thank you for sharing you experience and growth and one day I hope i will post one of these about myself

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Girl Code... Not Neccesarily in that Order.

"The only rule is don't be boring and dress cute wherever you go. Life is too short to blend in." Society can be such a drag. What, with all the unwritten, unsaid rules and codes. Guys have an elaborate ‘Bro Code’. In fact there’s a whole website . You will be surprised that Rule no. 1 of it is not the (in)famous ‘Bros before whores’. Girls have their own code too, though it’s not set in stone and varies among different groups of girls. The Girl code is especially tricky to girls like me who aren’t exactly programmed like other girls. So, I have a list of essential rules in the Girl Code. Some come with disclaimers and modifications. Some are universal while others are just stuff that my friends and I have come up with along the way. 1.        Should a Girl be critically injured, her Side-Girls are to never make jokes about it, unless the hurt Girl does first. I love my girlfriends…very much, but if said critical injury has risen as a result of a fall (wh
3 comments
Read more

Of Doing Milk and Staying Young

Boredom inspires/ drives me to do the unthinkable... like texting him to say how I couldn’t stand pretending that I didn’t like him...or drinking a glass of milk. I do not DO milk. And no, I am not lactose intolerant. As Max in ‘2 Broke Girls’ aptly points out, “Poor people don’t just run out to buy anti-biotics. You man up, grow a pair, and stare germs in the face...booyah!” I may not be poor but I am definitely not rich. People in my economic bracket don’t get fancy diseases like eczema. We get rashes, and if you want to get all fancy then you will have to do with ‘allergies’. So, no, I am not lactose intolerant. Where I come from it’s just a plain, simple ‘I don’t drink milk.’ But here I am, with a now half empty glass of milk. (I hope you can detect the pessimism there or else my pun will have gone to waste) I suppose the ‘Do Milk, Stay Young’ campaign hasn’t gone to waste. All that sexual objectification of infants wasn’t in vain. “Sexual objectification?” you ask. Yes,
4 comments
Read more

Fighting for my right to be wrong.

I feel as if our relationship has been progressing at an admirable rate... progressing enough for me not to just assume that someone somewhere is reading this, but to hope that this is so. Today has been a Monday, true to form. Murphy s law through and through. Anything that  could go wrong DID go wrong...but I don't want to bore you with the gory details. I do need to mention, though, that I was diagnosed with alarmingly high levels of typhoid fever. To be frank, I didn't feel THAT ill. I was simply mildly sick with a stomach ache and a head ache but the pharmacist wouldn't give me any meds until he had run some tests.Even after the diagnosis I still felt pretty amazing considering the shocked expression on the lab tech's face as he tries to make me understand how 'grave' my situation was. Dad wasn't as flippant about it as I was (His own face-to-face encounter with typhoid had confined him to bed for a week and he couldn't believe that my body was
1 comment
Read more