There is a version of me that had everything figured out. She was sixteen, absolutely certain, and wrong about nearly everything that mattered.
This is what I would tell her, if she would ever listen. Which she probably would not.
She was staunchly anti-adults. She hated how patriarchal opinions were packaged as tradition and pushed forward as wisdom. She believed that somewhere between youth and responsibility, every grown-up had traded curiosity for comfort and called it wisdom. She wanted nothing to do with that bargain.
She was not entirely wrong, honestly. But here is what she missed: the people she was so quick to dismiss were not less intelligent. They were just carrying things she could not yet see. Grief. Compromise. The particular exhaustion of caring deeply about something for a long time. The adults she scorned had spent years of anguish and joy and built themselves lessons out of it. That everyone offered something to you, even if it was simply the knowledge that you did not want to be them.
Her theory at sixteen was straightforward: tend to yourself, and trust that others would do the same. She spent a good while preaching independence and self-sufficiency, strongly believing the world would function well that way. It does not. The world is not built in silos, and everything spills into everything else. If you spend all your time building walls and believing that people do not deserve your effort, time, or attention, life will simply pass you by.
And then you enter the real world. Not the world of theories and convictions, but the actual one, with its noise and its people and its relentless, unglamorous pace. You show up somewhere at the very bottom, and you start. Work dismantled me, quietly and thoroughly, and then asked me to find a way to prove myself.
Work taught me in three major dimensions: First, the work itself. Everything is a passion project. Everything is something that someone worked very hard on. Every workplace is a complex system built very intricately. To be dismissive of it, or to think of myself as above it, was arrogant. I learnt that nothing was beneath me, and that the person who understood every layer of a system was always more valuable than the one who only wanted to be seen at the top of it.
Second, the people. People are exhausting and complex, and everything spills and clashes. But thinking I was above them was childish. It is always better to learn to sit at their table than to walk away. People can be brash, but they are also funny, good conversationalists, and generous introductions to knowledge I did not know I was missing. People can be as interesting as you allow them to be.
Third was me. I cannot say that work transformed me. I was still the person I always was. But work did something the sixteen-year-old version of me would have found deeply inconvenient: it proved her wrong. Steadily, over time, by being somewhere long enough to see results, and by caring about something beyond myself. Work taught me to swallow criticism, to show up the next day even when I did not want to, to take responsibility, and to stop avoiding consequences. To develop a work ethic so staunch that it sometimes even annoyed me. Work taught me to grow up, and that reflected in every other dimension of my life too.
I learnt what it meant to be a dedicated member of something larger than myself. To show up not just for my own ambitions, but for the people around me. A community only works if you actually invest in it. If you decide, consciously and repeatedly, that it matters.
And that is the thing nobody tells you at sixteen. Or maybe they do, and you simply are not listening yet. Growth does not arrive as a moment. It does not announce itself. It just quietly accumulates, in the background of ordinary days, until one morning you realise that the person you are is not quite the person you were. And that the distance between the two, however small, is everything.
She was wrong about almost everything, that sixteen-year-old. But she was also the beginning of all of it. And I think, if she could see where things ended up, she would be surprised. Maybe even slightly proud? If not, who wants to impress a sixteen year old, right? What do you even know?
I know you were wrong about almost all of it. You were right, however, about being happy. Everything is always about being happy. If you do not feel good, what are you doing it for?
