With each passing year of my life, I learn something new about myself or the chaotic world around me, and I wish with all my heart I had a time machine to go back in time and tell my younger self what's coming; to tell her everything will be okay.

Since "Back to the Future"got our hopes of time machines being invented by now up for nothing, the best I can do for that scared little girl is this-

You are eight years old. You are standing in the middle of a baseball field, boys and girls your age surrounding you, all in matching polos and khaki/plaid combinations. You love the days you play baseball in gym; you love to run, you love sliding into bases and getting your knees dirty, and you love how far the baseball goes when it’s your turn to hit it. You wind up your pudgy arm and squint through the afternoon blaze of sunlight, throwing a tiny purple baseball towards the lanky boy on home plate; a metal baseball bat in his hand. He doesn’t swing. Instead, he laughs.

You squint harder to find the reason, and when you do, you find him looking at the boy standing on third base. The boy standing on first. You hear the boy on second laughing, and the girls in the outfield are even giggling too.

“I’m not hitting a ball a girl throws to me. I want to play real baseball.”

Your throat feels hotter than the air around you, and you turn to your teacher sitting on the metal bleachers for reprise. He smiles, and asks you to switch places with the boy behind you. Your skirt suddenly feels like a navy blue prison, everyone is giggling, and the air feels so hot you cannot breathe. You are eight, and you never play baseball again.

You are twelve years old. You are standing in front of a full-length mirror with your best friends, trying on a bright blue bikini that Sarah stole from her older sister. You’re all passing it around, taking turns pretending you’re 15 like her sister, and pretending your mom lets you wear bathing suits that show your stomach.

“Ugh, I can’t believe how big my stomach is! I’ll never be able to wear a bikini in public looking like this.” Sarah says, squeezing the thinnest bit of skin that covers her hipbones. Your friends giggle and agree, and you look down, suddenly aware of nothing but the way the softness of your hips sneaks over the edges of your cotton skirt. Rachel complains about how “flat” her boobs are, and you are so afraid of your own skin, you lie and say you have a rash too bad to try on the bathing suit. You are twelve and your friends yell “ew” loud enough that it rings in your ears for hours later, but when you hear it, all you feel is the space you now occupy far too much of.

You are fifteen, sitting on a couch with the first boy to ever call you beautiful. His arm is around your shoulders and even though you don’t like it there, you don’t say anything.

His hand leaves the couch and you feel like your lungs are free, and then his hand finds purchase on the flesh of your thigh. He whispers “pretty, pretty girl,” and slides it higher, pressing down on the skin above your fly with his pinky. You whisper, “stop,” but he’s gone deaf. He weighs so much more than you do, and when he presses you down into the couch, he doesn’t care how loud you tell him to stop. He’s gone deaf to you.

You tell your school counselor the next morning because you heard that’s what you were supposed to do. When you tell her through your tears, she pulls her tortoise shell glasses off and raises one eyebrow. “Honey, boys will be boys. What were you wearing?”

You are fifteen, and you can’t look at yourself in the mirror anymore.

You are seventeen, and you occupy so little space in the world you can barely breathe. You hate the feeling of being small, but you know it is all you can be. Boys call you “hot,” they catcall you in the hallways, and you take it. You take it because you can’t stand to take up an ounce more of space.

Everyone has gone deaf to you, and it feels like this is how it will always be. It feels like this is how it’s always been; like this is how it’s meant to be.

You are seventeen, and it feels like the end.

You are nineteen. You have six notebooks full of the years passed, and they listen to you. They see you. They listen.

It did not begin with the boy at second base. It did not begin with blue bikinis, deaf hands, or silent pleading. It did not begin with shrinking, with becoming small, with breathing back your words. It did not begin with disappearing.

It began with you.

It began with gripping your lovehandles in the mirror every morning, even when it made you cringe, and telling yourself “I do not need them. I have myself.”

It began with writing your words down even when they sounded like the stupidest nonsense mankind had ever encountered; began with reading the incoherent scribbles and repeating, “I do not need them. I have myself.”

It began with wiping the lipstick off that you hated but wore because your boyfriend liked it. It began with wiping him off of you, too. It began with burying yourself in what you loved; not who loved you. It began with you curling your hands around your own ribs, counting your freckles, and whispering, “I do not need them. I have myself.”

It began when your reflection made you smile.

It began when you thought it was all meant to fall apart. It began in your giant heart, in your loving soul, in your brilliant, brilliant mind. It began with your softness that the world taught you so avidly to hate. It began with every tiny fragment of universal matter that composes you into the completely unique and irreplaceable thing that you are; human.

It did not begin with their validation. It did not begin with anyone else.

You are a universe, my dear. You are spectacular. You will make it, and you will make it fiercely.

You do not need their half-hearted compliments. You do not need their admiration of your figure in a bikini. You do not need their approval. You do not need anyone’s permission.

You do not need them. You have yourself.

You will always have yourself.

And that will always be enough.