Speaking to Older and Younger Selves, and Finding Contentment: Part 3 with Laura!

[Continued from parts 1 and 2]

Note: Interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Sofia: What’s something you would say to your younger self and if you’re thinking about speaking to an older version of yourself as well, is there anything you’d like to say or ask? It can be queer-related or not.

Laura:

My younger self for sure, I just wish I could tell my eleven-year-old self--I don’t know, I just wish I could give myself permission to be an outsider in a funny way. Because I felt like an outsider and I thought that was a really bad thing, but when I look back I’m like, of course you wanted to be an outsider, you didn’t want to be a part of what everyone else was doing. And I don’t think I thought there was anything wrong with me because I was queer, I actually kind of knew that deep down that there was nothing wrong with me. But I did think that there was something bad about choosing a life that was going to be a little different.

And eventually I got there, but that part really felt hard. I also think some of it was personality driven. I was a little bit of an introvert. I understood that both of my brothers were popular in the way that they had a million friends, and I secretly only wanted like one or two friends. But I wanted them to be my best friends and I wanted to spend all of my time with them. But I think I really thought that that was bad, that I was socially getting it all wrong. And I wish I could tell myself “Oh, no, you’re always going to feel that way.” Like, it’s not like I don’t like to be in big groups, but I prefer to be in small groups. I have a small group of friends from college that I’m in touch with all of the time, and they all like to do zoom calls together, and I don’t mind, I’ll do zoom calls with them. But still, at the end of the zoom call, I’m like, right, now I’m going to talk to each one of you separately for an endless conversation, because until that happens I don’t feel like I’m satisfied. And I think that when I was young I didn’t know that, so I felt so different for so many reasons, and I felt like somehow I wasn’t outgoing enough, and I was really hard on myself, I was like “you should be more outgoing!”

I went to [college] with my best friend, the one that [I’ve] talked about from when I was ten, so we were there and I remember one of the biggest fights of our whole life was when we went to college together. She was like, “I think we should branch out and find other people” and I was like “Why would we do that? We’re best friends.” And we were both not good at it in our minds, so we would blame the other one for [it], you know, and at the end of the day we would just find each other again anyway. And it took a really long time, until maybe my late twenties, to kind of figure out that that’s just kind of who I am in the world, and that’s okay. I’d rather find the one person that I connect really deeply with than the twenty people that I go out with who I’m sort of friends with. So, [for] my young self, I just wish that I knew that part of it was just a personality thing that’s a good thing. And that it’s not connected to the fact that I also knew already that I wanted to be with women at a time where nobody was out in my high school, and I already knew that made me different from people.

I don’t know what I’d want to ask my older self because it’s hard to kind of think what’s going to happen next. I think as I get older, I just keep feeling more authentically who I am, like in the same way for my younger self, I just didn’t know that it was okay.

And I hope that my older self looks back and tells me the same thing that I’m telling my younger self. I don’t know if you guys do this, but I still have some sense in my mind of what I think should happen by the time I’m a certain age. I’ve always done that in my mind even though I’ve never met my own timeline. So, I’m sure that I would love to have my older self come back and tell me “stop doing that thing about what you think is supposed to happen in five years because you’re going to be somewhere else than you think you’re going to be, and you’re going to love that place and it’s going to be great. And instead of feeling bad about not going in the direction that you think you should go, don’t worry about it because you’re going to end up exactly where you need to be.”

But I still think I do that, so I don’t really know what my older self will be doing. I have this recurring vision that I will have really long gray hair, so I hope that that's true. I would hope to [ask myself] “Is that true? Did your hair grow totally gray and did you let yourself just have beautiful silver/gray hair?” so, I guess that’s a wish and not a question. Because I do have a picture of what I think I should look like when I’m 70.

I feel, and this is really honest, at this point, at 41, I feel so content and happy with everywhere that I am, in my personal life and my professional life. And I think that’s really rare and I feel really really lucky about that. I tried forever to have [my daughter]. I tried for like 8 really hard, painful years, and when she got here, I was like “Oh, there’s nothing else really.”

If this was statically where I was and I just stayed at [our high school] forever, if you visit me in a zoom chat--hopefully we won’t be in zoom in the future-- if this is where I still am, I would be thrilled. And I recognize [that] many of my friends don’t feel content in the same way, and that’s why whenever anything sucks I just remind myself, “Look around, you are super happy!” All of the things that I kind of hoped for got to happen. So, I like to just practice gratitude all of the time for those things. So, I don’t know, maybe that’s kind of cheesy to say. But it’s true, I’m super happy, and it’s awesome.

And I think you guys are going to get to it too. If you’re lucky, you know who you are and what you want and then it happens!