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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.


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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

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