HEY MAN! IT'S ME FROM THE PAST! READ ME!

Dear FutureMe, Hey buddy, it's me. I'm writing this to you, me, myself? Irene? .... I'm writing this to myself as a 15 year old and when this email is delivered you should be 25. I got this idea from a reddit post of some chick who did the same thing when she was 22 and got a message from her 13 year old past-self. I'm writing this to you, because I want to remind you of what it was like when you were 15. As I am writing this, I have just come back from swim practice. You ******* hate swim practice. Somebody talked you into it, and now you're doing it for a stupid measly PE credit. You still have a month of swim season left; it ends on the 31st of October. It's literally a few weeks of swim practice, 15 to 20 days at the most, yet you feel like the days are dragging on slower and slower. Today in school you had a chemistry test. I think you did well, but you might have tripped up on those single-replacement reactions. You'll have found out tomorrow. At lunch you sat with the same people you sat with last year, but you aren't all that close with any of them. You crack jokes and make them laugh, one of them sends a casual "love ya" remark your way, but it doesn't mean much. None of them invite you to Domino's after school or whatever they do. You don't have a best friend. You've never had one. You're a sophomore right now, nearing the end of the first quarter of the school year. You've spent a whole year at this school before, yet you still feel alone like nobody knows you. Before freshman year during the summer, your parents shoved you into a BOOST program. It was held at the school for two weeks, and it was meant to introduce and familiarize the incoming freshman to the school campus and faculty. We had mock schedules to follow and classes to attend, but you didn't pay attention in any of them. You were too busy ogling the new and fascinating high school girls sitting across the room. On the first day of the program, your mock class was introduced to the school auditorium. You forgot to put in your contacts that day, so you didn't know if that girl staring at you from a couple rows behind was cute or not. Whatever. The last class of that day was art. The bell rang, you walked outside and started to head to the parking lot where your father was coming to pick you up. On the way there, you see that same girl walking ahead of you. You took the chance and ran up to her. Lucky for you, she was pretty hot. You exchanged names, talked about classes, and said "see you tomorrow." That week you sat next to her in assemblies, made her laugh, and got introduced to her friends. On the Friday of that week, the last class had just ended and you flirtatiously asked to kiss her in a "so cliche it was smooth" way. That was your first kiss. Fast forward to now: That girl is dating another dude now. He is a grade above you, and you can't help but dislike him. You're better than him in every way; you're funnier, smarter, better-looking, more interesting. Yet she never dated you. She said to your face "I'm not into commitment." You could have been with many cute girls in high school. Any one of them could have been your high school sweet heart. And I'm not just saying that to boost my 25 year old self's ego. Yes, you could have gotten a girlfriend and treated her right, but it wouldn't have been meaningful. Every girl you got close to in freshman year and this year so far hasn't nearly fit that puzzle piece that is the other half of you. What you want is real love, and not an empty high school fling. You're lonely. You don't have close friends, but you want to so bad. You're angry and sad all the time because of it. You cry every other day in private where nobody can see you because of it. You've had violent meltdowns in your room behind a locked door, because you don't want anyone to find out. You can't tell anyone. If you do, they'll just write you off as some manic depressed teenager who just wants attention. You can't tell your parents. You can't tell your sister or your brother. Because if you do, it'll change how they look at you. They'll pity you. You don't want ******* pity. You've been trying to fix this terrible depression for years. You've tried everything. You worked out, you hate healthy, you took up hobbies, all that ********. In the end, those things might have distracted you, but you cried anyway. You hurt and your hurt and you hate yourself for it. You are whimpering and screaming in your head everyday, and nobody knows. Listen, right now I don't think high school's going to get any better. I don't think I'm going to find a meaningful friend anytime soon. But maybe 10 years from now, that will change. The adult lifestyle is vastly different from childhood, and we had a **** one. So I guess I just wrote to remind you how bad things were for you in high school, and I'm just hoping they changed. And I'm just hoping that if you're happy now, that you really appreciate it, because you of all people understand what it's like to not be happy. Smooch smooch kiss kiss, from yours truly. truly.