Dear Teen Me from Author Anne Riley
Dear Thirteen-Year-Old Anne,
You spend most of your time in the closet.
Teen Anne, circa 1998 (15 years old).
No no, It’s not what it sounds like. I’m talking about an actual closet. The one in your bedroom. You shut yourself inside it with a book when you’re feeling overwhelmed. Sometimes you opt for the storage room upstairs. Or that lonely corner of the backyard. Anywhere you can slip off to and not be found, really. You’re not picky.
How’s eighth grade going? Sucks, right? The good news is that it’s way better than seventh grade. Your shag haircut is growing out into something halfway normal and your giant gold-rimmed glasses have been replaced by contacts (it takes you thirty minutes to put them in every morning, but whatever). Oh, and the best part? Your braces are finally, finally gone.
Compared to the shaggy, metal-mouthed, four-eyed disaster you were in seventh grade, you might as well be Heidi Klum.
Unfortunately, you still haven’t mastered the art of Being Social, hence the closet/storage room/lonely corner thing. Instead of going to the cafeteria at school, you would rather eat your lunch in an empty classroom with your one friend. You always get asked to dances (although you can’t fathom why) but the whole production of dress, makeup, shoes, dinner, pictures makes you so stressed out that really, you would rather just skip the whole thing and stay home in your pajamas. You’re on the volleyball team and hating every minute of it. In high school, your coach will try to move you from junior varsity to varsity because, guess what? You’re pretty good, kid. But you’ll say no because you don’t think the girls on the varsity team like you very much.
(You’re right. You would have been miserable.)
High school will be slightly less of an epic failure than junior high. You’ll make more friends (but only because you’re a band geek and you’ve managed to get in with other socially awkward people) and you’ll start working at Chick-Fil-A after school. By the time college comes around there will be a whole new layer to your social anxiety: The University of Alabama is a big place and there’s no way you can hide from 30,000 other kids ALL the time. Believe it or not, some of them want to be friends with you.
Adult Anne.
By the time you’re a sophomore, you’ll be signing up to be an exchange student. You’re going to live in Spain for a semester, and nobody’s going with you.
NOBODY.
You’ll get on a plane to Madrid, find your way to your new apartment, and spend the first month crying yourself to sleep. Then you’ll put your big girl panties on and start meeting some people. There will be so many new things to do, so many new people to interact with, so many -
Oh honey, don’t cry. This doesn’t happen for another six years. You don’t have to go anywhere right now. Please, just tuck yourself a little further back into whatever nook you’re hiding in and know that one day, all this will be different. Easier.
I promise.
Love,
Twenty-Something Anne
Anne Riley is 
an author of young adult fiction disguised as a high school Spanish teacher. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama with her husband and their daughter.
After graduating from the University of Alabama with a double major in advertising and Spanish, Anne wrote several complete manuscripts, none of which will ever see the light of day. In fact, she likes to pretend they never existed in the first place, although this isn’t really fair as those manuscripts helped her find her voice as an author.
Anne has written two novels she’s willing to share with the world, and a third is coming soon. She plans to write until she runs out of stories to tell, which, she admits, isn’t likely to happen anytime soon.
Other than writing, Anne enjoys reading, painting, watching interior design shows, pretending to cook, and drinking coffee until she starts to twitch. Her literary inspirations are as varied as her hobbies and include J.K. Rowling, Suzanne Collins, C.S. Lewis, Jane Austen, Kate Morton, and Alexandre Dumas.
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[...] Dear Teen Me from Anne Riley [...]
I loved Teen Anne…I love adult/wife/mother/author/teacher/basically wonderful person Anne too
So glad you are who you are and that we got to be socially awkward together 
So glad you found your way, Anne.
Dear Teen Anne,
Teen Shelly always thought you were cool. You were a year older than me, the section leader of the clarinets, you often had a boyfriend, you were tall, and you ALWAYS got asked to the school dances. You always seemed confident in yourself. By the way, I think Teen Shelly was right next to you in that really cool band picture.