Letter to My Younger Self
One of our remarkable clients recently wrote a heartfelt letter to his younger self—a brave and beautiful reflection on what it means to live authentically. Read the full letter below.
Dear Younger Me,
You won’t understand this fully for a while, but I need you to listen closely. There will be moments when you’ll feel like you don’t quite belong—like fitting in means giving up parts of yourself. People won’t always say it outright, but their words, their stares, their expectations—they’ll ask you to fold yourself smaller, to quiet the parts of you that feel different. You’ll watch others blend in effortlessly, and you’ll start to wonder if something is wrong with you for finding it so hard.
It starts small. Maybe it’s the way you interrupt without meaning to, or how you fidget when you’re supposed to sit still. Maybe it’s how your brain jumps ahead mid-conversation, or how something important slips your mind just seconds after hearing it. You’ll get good at covering it up—nodding at the right time, jotting reminders on your hand, smiling while overwhelmed. That’s a skill, but it’s also a mask. And the more you wear it, the harder it becomes to take off.
I need you to know something else, and this is important: they didn’t mean harm. You’ll hear that a lot. You might even say it yourself, trying to excuse the way someone dismissed you, corrected you, or made you feel small. But intention doesn’t cancel out impact. It doesn’t erase the ache of being misunderstood. And it certainly doesn’t mean you have to carry that alone.
In The Paper Menagerie, Jack spends years denying the parts of himself that others don’t understand—trying to reshape himself into something easier for the world to accept. It isn’t until it’s too late that he realizes what he’s lost. Don’t wait that long. Learn from him.
Hold on tightly to the parts of your mind that feel different. Don’t try to sand them down or hide them away. The way your thoughts leap, the way your passions burn bright and fast, the way you feel things too deeply—all of that is part of who you are. You don’t need to lie to belong.
There’s power in staying whole. There’s strength in refusing to become palatable just to ease someone else’s comfort. And there’s wisdom in knowing that sometimes the most radical thing you can do is to exist unapologetically.
You are not a mistake—nor a flaw to be corrected.
With love and strength,
Your Future Self
Endnote:
I chose to write a letter to my younger self because it gave me the space to speak honestly about my neurodivergent identity and how I’d learned to mask it in order to fit in. This genre allowed for vulnerability and directness—something that mirrors the internal conversations many of us have but rarely voice. The piece draws heavily on Ken Liu’s The Paper Menagerie, especially the idea of someone rejecting key parts of their identity to meet the expectations of others. Like Jack in the story, I began to suppress the parts of myself that others didn’t understand—particularly my ADHD and neurodivergent ways of thinking. The letter format felt natural for reflecting on this journey and offering compassion to my younger self, while also reinforcing the broader message: that self-erasure for the sake of belonging is a cost too high. The recurring phrase “they didn’t mean harm” also serves as part of the project’s repetend, exploring the gap between intention and impact that often defines these experiences.
