Written by Kitqfit (31)

Letter to the 18 year old Kitqfit
“If you do what you always did, you get what you always got”, if only I had listened to that the many times it was put to me in my life…

As I sit here, on a Sunday the first weekend of July. It’s terrible outside, the wind is howling & the rain blowing sideways, its 3.30pm and I’m still in my pyjamas with the fire going. It’s 2018 and its been just over 3.5 years since we bought this house, finally content with our lifestyle & journey. I have made some serious life choices the last couple of years, finally getting to a place of happiness & contentment & with an amazing man after being single for 10 years, it is exciting to look towards the future in a new light; but let me tell you, it was not always like that. I wish to go back to 2005 when you turned 18, there’s somethings I wish I could tell you, some advices I wish you had listened too, so here goes….

You started university this year, after wanting to leave your college years & friends behind, you hoped this will be a fresh start, new friends, new adventures, new experiences. You hated college, only there when you had to be, and not when you didn’t. it’s your first year out of college and you wanted a break from your friends, spending years on the out & fighting, you realized after all of those years you knew what they really thought of you. So, here’s to University.

Looking back now, if I could have told you anything going into 2005 after you hated your college years it would be ‘be yourself ‘& ‘don’t try to please others to get them to like you’.
You have always been uncomfortable in your own skin & well for the next 10 years or so you still would be. You have always been the fat one & your self-confidence has always been low. Take this year to find a new you, you don’t need to please others to have them be your friend, just be yourself, you will naturally attract great people who will want to be friends with you, for you. You have just got a new boyfriend, someone who is friends with your friends that you have had outside of college, he is pretty cool, funny & practically so talented. It is weird for you to have your first proper boyfriend, but you go with the flow, you also can’t really believe that someone likes you and wants to spend time with you.

I wish I could go back and tell you to ‘work hard’ & ‘make the most of university’, you might have stuck it out. Instead, you didn’t like going, you would get there, turn around and go back home. You only attended the classes you had to to get your attendance rate – you hated studying. Your dad put you on a study & essay schedule and this worked, you actually got some good grades, but your heart wasn’t it in. Again, you weren’t doing this for you, you were doing it for your parents. They wanted us to give university at least a shot, if you didn’t like it, fine, but give it a go. You wanted to make your parents proud, all of your schooling years you knew how important it was for our parents for us to get good grades and go to university, so the pressure to do well and keep going was high.

However, you didn’t stick at University, you didn’t finish that first year. You were over it, you wanted to go out and work. I remember the night you told your parents you didn’t want to go back, after a while, they agreed. This was the biggest relief you could have experienced, that night you went back into your room, shut your books & jumped into bed, the relief was euphoric, finally you had made a decision for you & you were so happy about it.

You are going to travel this year. Although you don’t believe you deserve it, your Dad has decided to take to you to Europe for 5 weeks. You finally get to go to Spain & see your favourite building The Sagrada Familia & other Gaudi works, it’s pretty surreal & you really can’t believe you will be there in person to see it. You have been overseas before, but never this far and never for that long. You will be in awe on your return, that there is a whole wide world out there, other people living in these places that your dreams are made of, & that these places a so very real. It’s also a bit of a reality check, you will come home and rave about your trip to your boyfriend, but you will be in disbelief when he maintains that he has no desire to travel, no intention to ever leave NZ because he feels everything he has and needs to see is here. All you want to do is travel more & you know your Dad has always said that no guy should ever hold you back from travel & dreams. This doesn’t sit well with you. How can someone not want to travel & see that there is more to life out there. Its enchanting, awe inspiring & you can’t wait to do more, you are thinking of where you already want to go next.

By the last quarter of this year you have entered full time work, you are wanting to move out of home & you are wanting to save money to travel. Finally, you feel like you have individual possibilities, you feel, if only you can save some money, then anything is possible.

Now for some nitty gritty home truths, at the age of 18 it is so hard to see the wood from the trees, you think everything is fine, you are just going about your daily business but let me tell you, sitting here today & the things that we went through in our 20s I can tell you that things get really hard going forward & you make some really stupid decisions, I wish at the age of 18 you had been able to recognize what was going on inside of you.

You didn’t love yourself, you didn’t respect yourself, this bring me back to pleasing people. You were happy to follow the crowd, pay for the food, pay for the drinks, be agreeable, drive your friends around, it made you feel important and it made you feel like you had friends. Don’t get me wrong, you had friends, but you felt you needed to ‘buy’ their friendship, I wish you hadn’t, I wish you really knew that people were your friend because they actually liked you. You didn’t need to ‘buy’ their friendship. From being the one that was called fat through school, always fighting with friends i guess you felt that by giving something back in return, this was the way you would retain a friendship.

You didn’t live the cleanest of lifestyles through the week and weekends, but you were functioning on the daily enough for you to get up every morning and go to work and do your work. You had quite a few trials and tribulations with your family, always feeling like the black sheep but yet, looking back I wish you had respected yourself enough to know you didn’t need to do this, that the reason your family where so hard on you is because they really did have your best interests at heart. Why is it that we can always see when we get older that we wish we had listened to our parents, we get why they were tough, we get why there were boundaries in place, if only we had listened. It is not until a few years later you would realise that you have an addictive personality but at the time, it seemed, you were just doing what you wanted to do, and nobody could tell you otherwise.

I don’t like to live in hindsight but maybe If you had had the insight and I been able to tell you this all these years ago, given you the self-awareness you needed you may not have gotten in to trouble a few years later. Getting in to trouble was the self-awareness wake-up call you needed, where you realized that the reasons your got in trouble deep down was because of the behavior of people pleasing, lack of self-confidence, lack of self-respect. I suppose sometimes it takes something major for things to come to a realization so that eventually a change can take place. At this time, you realise you who your friends really are, you realise what matters, who matters & what you really think about yourself. You have been pretending that everything is ok, but really on the inside you are so unhappy you can’t see what the future has instore, you can’t see yourself getting married, having babies or being with someone who even loves you.

Back to me here and now for a minute, sitting here on this horrible Sunday, if I am to recount the last 13 years, it is certainly eventful, tumultuous, eye-opening & lifechanging. If I could have told you when you were 18 that finally at the age of 30/31 you would find yourself, there is no way you could have seen that far ahead, how the heck could you possibly get to a place like that.

Stop getting in your own way you are the reason things happened the way they did, or you made the crappy decisions you did, you are the reason you didn’t want to study, or strive for better, you continued to get in your own way just going with the flow on the daily, you didn’t have any real goals to work towards and at the time you were fine with that, wondering through life aimlessly.

I’m sorry to say but your college years, 18th year of life, & there after just don’t seem so appealing, yes there were good times to be had with family and friends and events but really you were never truly content, you never ever really were happy.

Just over 1.5 years ago, you decided your life needed to change, although for the last 6 years you had stayed out of trouble, you had paid debt, saved, bought a house, lived an extremely independent lifestyle. After your first real break up in 2008 you really wanted to learn to stand on your own two feet and not be dependant on anyone. However, if I go back to 1.5 years ago, you had been living that independent lifestyle for far too long, you thought you had put a real rod in your own back, how could you let someone into that lifestyle now. But at the end of the day, babe, guess what…? You still weren’t happy, people thought you were, it was all a façade though, you didn’t like to display your feelings, you turned these off to protect yourself, you had been sick of being hurt over the years and this was the easiest way. But you finally realized you weren’t actually happy with yourself, still overweight, no one to share your life with, no goals for the next year ahead. Where the heck were you going.

I’d like to tell you that you finally decided to change your life, you wanted to be happy, you wanted to find someone to share your life with, you wanted a purpose. And guess what, you smashed it. You looked deep inside yourself, you re-evaluated your past, that was hard, there were tears and there was self-forgiveness and you finally put a name to the hurdles that had been holding you back.

If I go back to the reason you were single for 10 years you finally 8.5 years later work this out. It started one day whilst in a relationship of 3 years, you were lying in bed with your boyfriend & you asked him what he still liked about you. He said nothing. He rolled over, went to sleep & got up the next day, he left and never came back. Little did you know that this would hold you back from allowing someone in your life. I mean, if you didn’t like anything about yourself & he didn’t like anything about you, what possibly could someone else like about you. It came the time when you finally said this out loud, spoke about it, cried about it, forgave him for it & forgave yourself for it.

You decided you had to change your life. It had to change, there was no going back. You lost 50 kilos, you respected yourself & your body, you learnt to love yourself, talk to yourself lovingly & realise that you are good enough, you are good enough for yourself and for someone else. But at the end of the day if you couldn’t be happy, how could you make anyone else around you happy for that matter.

My dear 18-year-old self, it’s been a long 13 years, but you are finally happy. If I could put it all in a nutshell I would really honestly tell you – learn to be happy, learn to respect yourself, do not please others, just be yourself, do things for you, don’t get in your own way, set goals, have self-confidence, self-awareness & god dammit you are good enough. At the age of 18 you would never have known the context for all of that but most of all I would wish for you to have the self-awareness to put all of this into practice.

I am so happy for you now at the age of 30/31. Its taken a lot to get here but here you are, finally happy in your own skin, finally happy in your house, in your life, with goals & aspirations, with an amazing man (who might I add you met 8 years prior, maybe things would have been different if you had had the confidence to tell him you liked him) but really how could you have because you weren’t happy, you were living in an un-happy self.

My babe of an 18-year-old self, I have to tell you again. You are finally happy. You are living your best life, and you love it. Although you didn’t know or realise these things when you were 18, I am so happy that the life you have lived, with the ups and downs of the last 13 years has made you the person you are today.

Advise after overcoming this challenge:
Self awareness is a learned mental tool, it drives and influences a lot of decisions we make or have made in our lives. Still, today, I wouldn’t have it any other way. It took me many instances to learn the different ways self-awareness played a part in my life and decisions but I wouldn’t be the person I am today if I hadn’t have had those experiences.

Tool or technique that helps Kitqfit on daily basis:
I love self-affirmations, and mirror work. talk to yourself daily, tell yourself in the mirror that you do in fact love yourself & that you are good enough, confident & can tackle anything. Affirmation and mirror work can sound so goofy but its not until you actually put it into practice that you realise how powerful it is.

What do you think about the story of Kitqfit? Please leave a comment below and show some love!

Written by: Kitqfit (31)
Gender: Female
From: New Zealand

Favorite quote:

If you do what you always did, you get what you always got