A Love Letter to My Ten Year Old Self on the Eve of My 20th Birthday

Katie Regittko, they/them, co-chair
The next ten years of your life will rock your world in ways you could never imagine. All of your dreams will come true, and then they’ll come crashing down. But you'll realize there are bigger, better, more fulfilling dreams out there.

Right now you’re beginning to break apart. Things are hard, I know, they always have been. They’ll get a lot harder before they get better. You’re meeting friends who teach you about dieting, self harm, eating disorders. For the first time, you don’t feel alone, but you don’t know how alone these things will eventually make you feel.
Middle school will be hard. Your body, trust, and soul will be violated—I wish you didn't have to grow up so fast. In seventh grade, you’ll start thinking about your sexuality & gender, and you realize just how cruel people can be. It'll be hard, but it will also mobilize you and bring you to activism, which you'll find will save your life and give it meaning in many roundabout ways. The world will harden you, but your communities will show you how to be soft again. 

You get let down by two different high schools, but Junior year you'll find your home at a little school in Cary. You make it work. You become the person you dreamed of being who works with multiple non-profits and runs a bunch of clubs at school. Student body president, valedictorian, national councils, federal volunteer awards, published books and articles (see that teen vogue next to your bed? you actually will be in it one day and it's won't be because you're skinny), times square billboards, the works. This never makes you as happy as you think it might. It actually kind of breaks you, multiple times. Eventually you’ll admit to yourself and slowly others that it was a front, that you haven’t been yourself your entire life. You got the marks on your resume and the pictures to prove it, but the memories are shrouded in that pesky eating disorder. 

You'll fall in love with a university and get rejected. You'll fall in love with losing weight and lose everything. You'll fall in love with being sick and think your life is over there. Hold on, because one day you will fall in love with your life, or at least parts. 

You adopt a dog in high school who saves you over and over. At points, she'll be the only thing keeping you going, and for that and so many other things, I'm grateful for her. She’s lying next to me snoring now. We regulate (if you knew what I know now, you'd roll your eyes at that). 

You bounce in and out of "recovery", sometimes believing yourself and others not. The eating disorder is always there in some way. You get really good at lying, and it's not a good thing: eventually, you start to forget the difference between the story you tell other people and the one you're living. In college, you'll describe yourself as an "eating disorder Clark Kent". After freshman year, you start to embrace authenticity and find the strength to speak your voice and story regardless of its messiness. 

You go to your last choice college and continue to make it work. Things are rocky. Things hit the fan over and over. I don’t want to scare you with how many times you’ll find yourself in hospitals and psych wards and treatment centers. The labels of "treatment resistant" and brushes with death. But you make it through. People who don't give up on you trickle into your life and you slowly let them. 

That psychology major dream? It was never your dream. You never wanted to be a therapist, you just wanted help. You fall head over heels in love with Sociology in high school (I know, it’ll make more sense later on) and eventually shift your specialization to criminology in education and then to healthcare & disability studies. Revolution runs in your veins. You never stopped wanting to help people through it all—that wish only became stronger the more you struggled. It will become more sustainable when you focus on your own healing. 

One day, you’ll get tired of your own bullshit. You’ll realize no one is coming to save you and in a last ditch effort you make the hard decision to do it yourself. It doesn’t get easier, until sometimes it does. One day you’ll find yourself waking up and the first thought is “what’s for breakfast?” not “what’s the number on the scale?”

You’ll find forever friends and travel and repair your relationship with your parents. You’ll cry and scream and numb and suffer but make it out alive. You’ll start doing  work that you’re passionate about and that truly helps people. You connect with your ancestry and convert to Judaism after a life-changing trip to Europe. You abandon music in a hard moment and find it again years later in a cold treatment center one Saturday morning among people who make you feel heard. Oh, and baby, you’re not a liberal. I’ll let you figure that one out for yourself later in a few years (pick up a book about the Zapatistas for a head start).

You’ll become a person you hate, and then a person you are proud of. You find your way, again and again, stumbling, but never giving up completely. And I’m proud of that. I’m proud of you at ten, proud of the ways you learned to adapt and cope and survive in your youth, and even more proud that you eventually learned other ways, even if I don't always use them yet. There will always be another way.

Hold on, sweet one. It’s a long and painful ride, but there are some highlights and eventually you make it through. I’m writing this in an apartment in Carrboro with a roommate who’s one of the best people I’ve ever met and a pug & two rats. This little family you've built makes it harder to give in on the bad days and makes the good ones more meaningful. Tomorrow I’ll celebrate the end of my teen years with cake and alcohol and food and movies because we can do that now. We always could (okay, easy on the alcohol).

With love,
Katie, 2020

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