Letters To Our Younger Selves

A Letter to a Once Little Girl

Dear Little Gillian (and whomever else stumbles upon this),

Hi there. It has been a little while, hasn’t it? It feels very strange to be sitting here, writing to someone who doesn’t exist anymore, someone who cannot read this because she simply isn’t anymore. But it is also refreshing and almost freeing, knowing the pain of part of what I have to say cannot be consumed by someone who does not deserve to feel it. The purpose of this letter is to speak to you, my younger self, and share how we have found our voice. And to share our story with anyone else in the world who finds themself reading this. Buckle in and take a moment; a lot of this gets heavy at times. 

When we were growing up, we really loved school. Way more than the average kid, we strived to be reading, learning, and growing our brains to be as full as possible. For us, as you know, we found our voice through teaching others. Thank goodness we’ve always had an amazing mother; she never stopped us from getting in the car after school, and just yapping away about everything we learned that day. And that love of teaching didn’t stop all through elementary school. It grew immensely when we became an aunt and we had two even tinier humans to teach all about life. In good news, little Gillian, those tiny humans are not so tiny anymore and are still our best friends in the whole universe. We have spent their whole lives teaching them and plan on being there for them always.

Things really began to change in middle school. I mean, of course, they did; middle school is a really weird time for everybody. But it wasn’t the same change that everyone was experiencing. Slowly, things began to pile. There were the comments, the bullying you didn’t yet recognize as bullying until you painfully did. So suddenly every day your stomach hurt, you didn’t want to go to school, you stopped eating, you never slept, you worried, and you worried, and you worried.

You stopped teaching much of anything. It’s pretty hard to teach others when you can’t stop the never-ending tornado of thoughts. Little Gillian, I wish I could go back. I wish I could have told you that you were worried about all the wrong things. I wish I could have told you that your childhood would be cut oh so short. But I couldn’t, and I can’t. 

On May 25, 2018, you went to school and walked out a completely different person. That morning, your classmate and fellow 7th grader brought a gun with him. And he changed the course of your life forever. You heard the shots ring through the halls, and the screams come down the stairs. You hid for hours, not knowing where your brother was or if he was alive. You sat, with no way of contacting your family, on the floor of the high school men’s locker room showers for literal hours. 

You had to go into hiding at the high school you were evacuated to because more classmates decided to “be funny” and call in a bomb/shooter threat. You saw, heard, and felt things that are permanently cauterized into the very functioning of your heart, mind, and soul. They are just as vivid to you today as they were when you were 13. You just can’t shake it. Your goofy little girl self is gone, ripped away by something so sinister and so out of your control.

So then it all really started. All of a sudden, you scream at loud noises. You weren’t paying attention to anything; you were daydreaming about strategies. Where would you hide? What would you throw? How would you get out next time? You would analyze what happened. How could you be so stupid? Why did you freeze when the loudspeakers first announced it wasn’t a drill? Why didn’t you do something? What could you have changed?

One minute you’re in the library working on a project, the next you’re sitting in a therapist’s office being told you have post-traumatic stress disorder, and “Here are some strategies to help you cope!”. So then you swallow your voice. Now you’re really not eating, starving yourself on purpose in order to feel something. 

So high school rolls around, and you’re in a brand new school district. Your anxiety is crippling; everyone has questions for the girl from the school where it happened. But you don’t want to tell them, your mouth is glued shut. You find yourself tired all the time. Coming home from school and immediately falling asleep on the couch was normal for you. You hardly touched your lunch at school because you were so anxious, so you would eat it on the car ride home.

Then the world shuts down. We all went through something called a pandemic; basically, we were all cooped up and had way too much time with ourselves. This, little Gillian, was the trail of gunpowder being lit for you.

Your thoughts began to darken. Slowly, you decided you weren’t good for anything, and nothing was worth it anymore. I can remember the nights when I would start to write our suicide letter. For months and months, I would write one and then stop myself, and write one and stop myself, over and over. And then we went back to school, and then… there was this guy.

You had known him for years, but he hadn’t fully connected with you that way until then. Before you knew it, you were alive again. You were excited to go to school and start each day for the first time in years. We had once again found a reason to live. But, little Gillian, one of the most important life lessons you have ever learned is that true happiness comes from within. It isn’t something you can find from someone else alone.

It didn’t take long for the joy to fade. From the abuse from his mother, to the lies from his mouth, to the assault he’d commit against you when you were most vulnerable, this guy you thought was the answer to everything turned out to be what almost killed you. We did everything we were supposed to, Gillian. We thought that when we told him we needed help, and that the thoughts were so dark they told you to do bad things, he would do something. We thought that describing to him in detail the graphic dreams in which you stabbed yourself to death in the kitchen would make him do something. And it did; he left. So you decided that was it. 

Except we were wrong. That was not it. Not even close. Mom kept us going. She didn’t let us sleep in bed all day; she made us go to the doctor and get medicine. And she stopped letting us starve ourselves. Senior year, you sat down with your guidance counselor. You were determined to take a year off from school and then decide what to do. She presented you with an option: spend your senior year in filler classes you didn’t really need, or spend half a day every day helping in a 1st grade classroom.

The choice was quite simple: do a bunch of homework for classes that meant nothing, or color with little kids for hours. But Gillian, it was so much more than that. We found our love for teaching again. We got to help small minds grow, we learned how to learn to read (trust me, it makes sense), and we made connections we never dreamed we could.

It took us many years, but we have gotten back to what truly gives us a voice: teaching others. Not only are we currently in college for elementary education with a minor in special education, but we also use our experiences and trauma to educate others. We have advocated for ending gun violence, and we get to use what we have gone through to let others know they are not alone, and things need to change.

So, little Gillian, we’re okay. We want to be here now. We want to teach, we want to learn, we want to grow. It’s a little scary navigating a life you never planned on living, but it is so worth it. I hope you and whoever reads this know that you are never alone, it is always worth it, and there is always light on the other side of darkness.

With so much love,

2025 Gillian