Dear Teen Me, From Author Nancy Holder (WICKED, POSSESSIONS,CRUSADE)

Dear Teen Me,

You’re sixteen, and you’re standing in the senior lot of Grossmont High School, leaning against a car, and he (the senior whose presence makes this location legal) is leaning against another car, facing you.  So you are both en profile.  He is Kevin, and he is hot, and is breaking up with you.  Kevin.  But here’s the deal:  even while your heart is shattering into billions and billions of shards, and each of those shards is being pulverized into quadrillions of granules, you find yourself thinking:  “The way we’re standing would make great blocking in a play.”

And you think that must mean there is something seriously wrong with you, because how can you think of that at a time like this?  How does it even occur to you?  You feel like you’re about to die, and you’re thinking about stage directions?

Then you go over to Marcia’s to fall apart.  She’s your best friend and her mom is never home, so Marcia knows how to cook.  And Marcia makes that salad with the blue cheese dressing and tiny shrimp, and between sobs, part of you thinks, “I love this stuff.”

At the time, as you eat salad and lie on Marcia’s bed, you think that here, finally, is proof that you’re shallow, or schizophrenic, or that Kevin hasn’t broken your heart after all.  Maybe you are heart free.  Because there is more salad, and you are stoked.  You think you have to feel something one way, a hundred percent, or you must not really care about it.

Now, with Kevin, it’s just as well, because at one point, you told him that if he didn’t stop smoking, he couldn’t kiss you any more.  And he said, “Okay,” and made a big deal of pulling out a cigarette and lighting up.  So, you see, he’s a jerk.  But he also took you great places on dates—movies, rock concerts—and you decided that meant he was The One.

But after he breaks up with you, you get to date a guy with a Mustang.   He is very, very sweet, and he does stuff like take you to Disneyland, which is, after all, the happiest place on earth.

But then you break up with him. Because you drop out of high school and move to Germany to become a ballet dancer.

After you get to Germany, you’re a basket case.  You’re excited to be there and upset to be there and you want to dance but your feet are really, really hurting.  The bones in your feet are shifting from all the pressure on them and you go to the doctor (der Arzt) hoping he’ll tell you that you can’t dance.  Instead, he tells you that when the pain is bad, you can get an injection of cortisone.  Everything is in order!

You begin to worry about having dropped out of high school but really, if you want to be a professional dancer, you have to devote yourself to it day in, day out.  And you actually wish that that big honkin’ can of sauerkraut you dropped on your toe at the grocery store had shattered your big toe so the doctor could not put it back together again.

But when it’s time for adagio class, or folk dance class, or flamenco or castanets, you’re in sheer heaven.  You are blissed out and you don’t care about anything else.  When you listen to Air on a G String, you feel yourself dissolve on the waves like the little mermaid.  Hand on the wooden barre, shoes squeaking with piney rosin, in your sweaty tights and leotard, you are in the only home you know.

But after class, you have that same Kevinish, twisted realization that you feel a lot of different ways about the situation.  The doubts and second-guessing.  If you were committed to ballet, there would be no mixed feelings, no indecision, right?  You would be like an Olympic ice skater, so driven that you’d just bandage up that aching toe and hop into your pointe shoes.  But all your toes are getting knobby, and your toenails are falling off; and you’re pretty sure that after all this grief, you’re going to wind up as the 57^th swan on the left; that is to say, that you are talent-free.

But how can you just QUIT?

Long story short, your father dies and you are summoned home to finish high school.  And now you’re a basket case because you aren’t in Germany.  You are going to high school and people are talking about music groups and homework, and you don’t care about any of that.  You have blasted past that.

Or…not?

Eventually, you finish high school, and you are faced with what to do next.  You’ve been accepted into college, but you have no idea what to major in.  You’re still dancing, and that sounds good, too.  You want to have a passion for something.  You want to care deeply.

So you dance some more, and you fall in love again; then you get injured again and your heart is broken again, and you are nineteen.  You give college a go.  It takes changing your major five times (three officially), applying for grad school twice and dropping out twice, until you finally decide to look at all this fragmentation and indecision.

And you discover something amazing:  a lot of people feel this way.  They run hot and cold and lukewarm and they freak out and change their minds and eat potato chips and change their minds again.  Multiple times.  They just don’t own up to it.  And when you talk about it—when you tell the Kevin story, for example–they light up and say things like, “I thought I was the only one!”  Watching your tiny daughter yakking with a little girl at elementary school, the fellow mom beside you even hugs you and says, “Oh, God, thank you for talking to me about this!”

Only…you haven’t talked to her about it.  You’ve delivered a monologue of how you fret and ponder and mull and wonder about consequences, and she’s listened the whole time, kind of jumping up and down and saying, “Me too!  Only I never knew how to put it into words before.”  For her, it was a conversation.  A connection.  Communication.

And now you have discovered your true passion.  You’re the one who can put all your confusion about passion—everybody’s confusion–into words.

You’re a writer.

You’re a writer who has a passion for talking about passion, or the lack thereof, in a hundred different ways, through memories you remember, or lie about, or embellish, or tell straight, or stories you make up.

You’re a writer who some days wonders if she should be a writer or if she should just chuck it; a writer who can’t imagine doing anything but; a writer who has stress dreams in which she has one more chance to be a dancer; a writer whose feet have been described by a friend as “uglier than a monkey’s.”

A writer who has stayed home from a party tonight to make a deadline.  Ratz!

But you’re also a writer who’s absolutely positive that all the confusion and passion twisting around in the kaleidoscope of her mind means she’s doing exactly what she should be doing.

Especially when your email box dings and someone writes:  “How did you know?”

So, my Teen Me, endure that humiliation from Kevin while you block the scene.  Savor Marcia’s salad while you listen to sad, sad songs and she tells you he was a jerk anyway.  Go in and out of school.  Keep your sore bones warm with socks.  Love all those bozo guys.  Fill your cup with angst and marvel at the many, many ways the world turns.

Then write it all down.  Because that is what you were born to do, and that’s what you’re going to do.  And I promise you that one day, you will be very clear on that.

With lots of love,

Your Older Self

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Nancy Holder is the New York Times bestselling author of the young adult dark fantasy series, WICKED, cowritten with Debbie Viguié, and a four-time recipient of the Bram Stoker Award, for her supernatural fiction.  She has sold approximately eighty books and two hundred short stories, essays, and articles.  She is well-known for her tie-in work for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Smallville, Hellboy, Saving Grace, and other “universes.”  She is also the author of the young adult horror series, POSSESSIONS, and she and Debbie Viguié have sold two other series:  CRUSADE, available now; and THE WOLF SPRINGS CHRONICLES, available in January 2012.

She is a faculty member of the University of Maine’s Stonecoast MFA in Creative Writing, a low-residency program.

She lives in San Diego with her daughter, code name The Chumash Woman; their two cats, and their two magical Corgis.

Tags: Simon & Schuster, Simon Pulse, YA