Dear Tedy,

I still vividly remember the moment you wrote that letter to your future self. You were laying in your pink sheets back at home and for some peculiar reason you were hopeful. Perhaps now I understand why. Going back home has always left you feeling unstoppable and recharged. But this feeling often proved to be an illusion. You go back to the Netherlands and there’s a week of hopeful feel good moments. And then you crash. This other reality makes you crash.

In many ways you changed and in many ways you stayed the same. Overtime, the crash you experienced each time after coming back felt smaller and smaller. I’m not sure that it fully disappeared to be completely honest. But what’s important is that its power has faded.

This is why I am writing this letter to you now. From a girl who is struggling to accept herself sometimes, to the girl that couldn’t live with herself.

In this way a lot has changed for good. When you wrote that letter I remember you said: “I hope you’ve got it all figured out now”. Well I have, and I haven’t. In many ways I grew much more comfortable with the idea that this new place I live in now is a different kind of home, yet in many ways I keep struggling with loneliness the same way you did. However, I learnt a lot. To begin with, I learnt how to control the impulse of loneliness. And now I am writing back to you, because you deserve to know the things I did understand as the years passed by and because I learnt that I deserve to free my voice and speak up.

*I will not continue to write the rest of this letter addressing you, my past self in the “you” form. It feels too distant and somehow very much instructive. Instead I will use the “I” because no matter the differences between us you are me and I am you.*

I always thought that fitting in and belonging are the same thing. At least that’s what you thought in the year of 2015 when you were about to move to the Netherlands. “If I fit in, then for sure I’ll feel like I belong there”, that was on your mind at the time. However, my subsequent experience proved me wrong, as I failed to recognize that one does not equal the other. As Brene Brown said: “Fitting in is about becoming who you need to be to be accepted. Belonging, on the other hand, doesn’t require us to change who we are; it requires us to be who we are.”

Perhaps this was my biggest mistake at the time. I was so focused on the idea that I will start my life all over again as a part of this new amazing reality that I failed to consider that perhaps things will not go as planned. As a girl coming from an Eastern European country what I considered “normal” turned out to be contrastingly different than what the International school lifestyle proved to be. In the words of Uzma Rizvi: “identity informs how we experience and consider the world” and in the beginning this is precisely what I was not aware of. And this is where I crashed, as I experienced a massive culture shock followed by the inability to find that sense of belonging, because reality was not what I expected and I wasn’t ready to face that reality. As Rizvi says: “It is important to understand that recognizing systems of power and one’s place in them is a tool that can be utilized.” I wasn't doing either. The system, which at the time was the school’s social hierarchy and the importance of being a “cool kid” clashed with my personal sense of worthiness. I thought I was a “cool kid” before leaving my home country, but it turned out that international “cool kids” care, talk and laugh about different things.

And so my self alienation process began. The one thing I managed to recognize was how different everything was and that was how my silence was born. I decided that there’s no point in trying since those people were so different than myself. They could have never understood me, right? Well, perhaps that may have been true, but the silence caused a lot of pain, and struggle and so many missed opportunities. “The fear of being perceived as unworthy is enough to force us to silence our stories”, Brene Brown says. This fear felt so overwhelming when I finally understood what my new reality looked like. But that was my key mistake. I kept comparing my new surroundings to my home country. I shouldn’t have. Rizvi claims that: “the first moments of recognition have to do with recognizing oneself as radically other, not of this system, not of the normalized way of being”. Now I understand it. Back then I was acknowledging all those differences as a part of the system, yet I failed to understand that the system changed.

The following years, as a result, turned out to be rather uneasy for my personal appreciation and self-acceptance, as I was refusing to “decolonize aesthetics, pedagogy, [and] archaeology [of] the systems by which we are taught”, as Uzma Rizvi says. In other words, I was culturally stuck. But what is interesting about her narrative is that Rizvi continues by stating that:”The moment one recognizes the fluidity of culture, then one has the ability to make that change. Often we feel trapped in one system, and we feel the system is so much larger than we are; but we are the ones who are keeping that system going.” At the time it really felt like the opposite, like the system was controlling myself.

The downfall of my happiness spiraled so quickly that I did not even gasp the moment between “I feel motivated to start my life in a new place” and “I feel worthless”, because alongside my inability to embrace the positive aspects of the differences I was experiencing came my alienation. Because I had no one to talk to I didn’t feel like making an effort to even engage in some small talk. A very dangerous cycle to be in. The silence led to sadness. I was not conscious of the fact that “the mode of resistance has only ever worked through collaboration, finding allies and solidarity with others”, because, “care for and with others is also self-care”, as Rizvi says. Now I realize why people say that before you can love another person you must initially learn to love yourself. Brown adds to this by stating that: “we can only love others as much as we love ourselves”, because, “the connectedness we experience in our relationships impacts the way our brain develops and performs”.

This letter is getting really long. I guess the one thing that never changed is my inability to be short and concise, but in the words of Brown: “true belonging only happens when we present our authentic, imperfect selves to the world”. It couldn’t get any more authentic than a too long letter.

There is only one last thing I want to talk about. Perhaps it's the most important thing I understood for these years, and that’s just to take it easy. The amount of pressure I was executing over myself at times for some irrelevant stupid situations that didn’t matter at all was insane. I was punishing myself and that wasn’t necessary. I’ve always been the “serious” type and this is the quality I am unlearning now, or better said, learning how to be goofy, because I realized that life is what you decide to make of it. So then happiness could be “fabricated”, because the only thing that’s stopping us from embracing a life of happiness is simply ourselves. The final thought I want to end this letter with is Brene Brown’s view on perception, she says that: “Until we teach our children that they need to be concerned with how they look and with what other people think, they dance. They even dance naked.” Truly, a beautiful thought.

Love,
Tedy

THE LETTER

P.S. Dance like nobody's watching.

The works cited in this letter are Decolonization as Care by Uzma Z. Rizvi and The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are by Brene Brown

This letter is meant for the girl that four years ago in the summer of 2016 wrote a letter to her future self. This letter was addressed to be read three years later. Now the same girl is writing back. Her “future” self sharing everything that she learnt for the past years.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brown, Brene. The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are. Hazelden Publishing, 2010.

Rizvi, Uzma Z. Decolonization as Care.