Sometimes I miss you, other times I'm glad you're gone. Sometimes I envy you, other times I hate the thought of you. Sometimes I wish you made it to where I am today, but most of the time I'm glad I left you in the past. It's safe to say I have a love/hate relationship with you.

I've learned a lot of lessons from you, but I wish I could say it was you who was able to learn lessons from me. But then again, you live and you learn from your mistakes, so maybe it's best for the person I am today that you weren't as knowledgeable about the world, the people around you, and yourself.

So here it goes.

To the high school version of myself:

I wish you were more conscious about how you treated those that genuinely cared about you in those first couple years of high school. You let a lot of people slip through the cracks that deserved to remain on an unbroken platform, and you burned a lot of bridges without realizing most can't be fixed. You lost sight of the most important qualities to look for in those that you surround yourself with. At times you chose quantity over quality, which didn't do you very much good. Definitely caused you a lot more trouble than it was worth.

Eventually, you figured out how to treat and care for the people that are healthy for your life, later than you should have though. You learned who was really there for you, and who was going to enhance you as a person. I am sorry that you had to learn this the hard way. As Gnash once said, "friends can break your heart too", and I know you would agree. The good thing is though, you being so careless when it came to picking friends taught me all the right ways to pick them. Now, I don't think I could be any happier with the people I choose to call my friends.

Thank you for not falling in love. I know you ran from it, and I use to resent you for that. I use to wish you had taken the chance and cared for someone else's heart more than you did your own. But now I am grateful that you didn't. I'm glad you took romantic relationships lightly during these years because you didn't know it then, but now I can see that I am more independent because of it. I am also glad you didn't give me the wrong idea about what "love" actually is.

I have to admit you were extremely cold hearted and hurt more people than you should have along the way though, including yourself a little. You weren't good with emotions whatsoever, and it was hard for people to understand that your, what seemed to be short and empty apologies, carried a lot more guilt, and ache for them that they weren't able to see. I am glad you never fell in love, but I wish you were aware of the fact that on the inside you were running from love, but on the outside, you were chasing it.

I do admire how carefree you were, even though it come back to bite you in the end sometimes. I miss being able to make impulse decisions, and not worrying about having a detailed plan when it came to how you were going to spend your free time. You definitely were the type of person who would drop what she was doing just to go for a car ride, or go get some food, or to go have a fun night out with your friends. I envy the ability you had to live in the moment.

I wish you were nicer to and more appreciative of your mom. I wish you realized back then that she truly is the greatest best friend that you will ever have in life. She is more understanding than you realized at the time and isn't someone that you should be worried about judging you. Her love is truly unconditional, and shouldn't be taken for granted. Looking back, you definitely weren't as close with her in high school as I am now. I try to think about what your guys' relationship was like back then, but I can't, and that truly makes me sad. I know that you admired and respected her, I just wish that maybe you would've spent more time with her than the toxic people that you chose to. I wish you had laughed a lot more with her, maybe even cried. But the present day version of myself and her have the best relationship I could ask for, I just wish you would've been able to experience this back then.

Lastly, I wish you would have loved yourself a lot more. I wish you had realized your worth back then and were more confident in yourself. I have truly learned what "self-love" is over the last year, but I wish that you had the opportunity to learn and experience this. I wish that you never once looked at yourself in the mirror and told your reflection that it looked awful in what you were wearing, and then thrown a t-shirt on that covered yourself up. People's opinions of you don't define yourself, you write your own definition. You need to make your decisions that will better yourself. I regret letting yourself walk through everyday life with that heavy awful feeling that you weren't good enough for whatever it was that put you down that day. I wish I had let you put more energy into yourself than you did other people.

There's a lot of things that I wish would have been different for you, but I'm sure back then I wished my life would be different than it is now. You can't change the past; just make changes now that can improve the future. So to the high school version of myself, thank you for all that you did to make me into the person I am today.