12 year old me was a skinny kid with hair that was much too big for his head. I don’t have the best memory, but I recall wearing black stonewashed jeans that even at the time I knew weren’t fashionable, but my folks weren’t rich, and at that point in time I was still idealistic enough to think that most people judged me on my personality, not on my jeans. I was starting junior high. Afternoons were often spent playing Kick The Can outside, or Syndicate or Scorched Earth on the computer. Whatever I thought I knew about the world at 12 years old, I really knew nothing at all. And that wasn’t a bad thing.
I’m pretty sure that young me was still convinced that he’d be a marine biologist one day. That would mean living by the ocean, and that meant living somewhere warm. Or at least warmer than where I’m from!
Those were years when people were concerned about aerosols and the ozone layer. I got into trouble in every class, it seemed. Mostly for talking. I was bored. One of my teachers tried to challenge me with more extracurricular projects, but I’m getting a little ahead of myself, because that wasn’t for another two years.
It was around that age that the first big changes started to occur within my nucleus of friends, because somewhere around half of them went to a different junior high than I did. My best friend had moved about as far away as you could move. We got combined with new kids that I didn’t know. Some were great. Some weren’t.
Instead of continuing to pursue sports that had been my mainstays throughout elementary school, I started getting into badminton, and I’m not sure what else. I didn’t try out for some of the teams because I started to recognize that I was smaller than other people, and I’m not sure that that had ever occurred to me before, or been an issue.
I got robbed for the first time in grade 7. A few grade 9 guys from a school not far from mine cornered me in an alley and took my walkman. I remember throwing a punch and making a mad dash for a bus that arrived in the nick of time.
I digress.
The advice. They say hindsight is 20/20. They also say that if you were to go back and change anything in the past you wouldn’t be who you are today. That being said, you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who hadn’t done dumb things that they regret. It’s not really the stupid mistakes that I’d warn my younger self about. Frankly, young me would probably just find other dumb mistakes to make. That I can accept. If I were going to give advice to my former self, it would be advice about spending and saving, about good risk and bad risk. I’d tell 12 year old me that time is his most valuable resource, and to join more sports.
I’d tell him not sweat the small stuff. The one thing a kid can’t do is see the big picture, or know the long game. It’s a feature of their youth that they only thing they know is the moment. Young me could have stood to have relaxed a little, not taken himself as seriously.
Last of all, I’d have told him to get passionate about something. (Other than girls.) Old me is probably just a reflection of young me, so that might not be fair advice, but it sure would’ve made life easier if young me had been able to settle on a nice quiet future in dentistry…
Cheers!
grownupmonkey 