Dear Twelve-Year-Old Callay,

The first thing I want to tell you is that in the next eight years you are going to learn a lot about yourself. I am not going to lie to you and say the next eight years of your life are going to be peaches and rainbows because they are not. You will move a couple times, your parents will go through a divorce, you will lose people close to you, you will switch schools a couple times, you will go through crushing heartbreak, you will get diagnosed with anxiety, depression, and ADD, and about a trillion or two other things. It is eight years after all. There will be days that you will never want to end and there will be days you are going to want to give up on everything. There are going to be days that you will be so happy that you will cry and there are going to be others where you will not be able to stop crying in sadness. You will learn that life sucks sometimes and that is totally okay. You will learn the importance of self-care as well as the dark path that not doing it will lead you down. You will go through some really dark times. There will be days where you go to bed and do not want to wake up the next day. You will learn that these days/weeks/months will pass even though in the moment you will think they will last forever. You will learn that you have the power within you to advocate for what you need. You will learn to listen to what you need though it might take you a while to realize what it is sometimes. You are going to learn mental health is a life-long journey. This is probably the biggest lesson about your mental health you will learn. You should never think that your mental health is fixed or better because that just is not how mental health works. Mental health like life is messy, hard, and a new adventure every day. You don’t know what the next day will bring but you have many tools in your tool belt to take whatever challenge comes your way. I hope this quick note helps a little bit. Just know that you always have me in your corner.

Much love,
Nineteen-Year-Old Callay