letter to my past selves

in short: I've graduated high school and look back at times I thought I would never say the first part of this sentence.

Dear Tabea/Bonnie,

picnicking with your childhood friend. falling in love with life over and over again. realising what people you wanna surround yourself and figuring out where in the world you wanna settle down your heart. holding on onto people who you truly care about and now that school’s finished miss dearly as your soul is used to at least be around them for 10 seconds a day. this is who you will become at age 17, a high school graduate with majors in German, English and Music. yes, music.

i know what you think. who is this person? is it really possible for me to become this?

yes, it is.

we’ve enjoyed elementary school and always yearned back these times when school ended around 2pm and friends awaited a call from us and we’d go swimming in the lake nearby our home.

we’ve been so proud once at age 10 we entered the school our brother graduated. we were so alive and didn’t crave the future yet cause the present moment was beautiful and hopeful. we still wrote here and there. we had our little goal of becoming a published and established author one day. no one interpreted it as a joke yet. we were still a child.

Middle school and the opportunity to be the youngest writer of the popular school musical. We took the opportunity and changed every inch of our small life. People perceived our talent who looking back at it didn’t deserve it. People who had little power and unfortunately big influence. People who lied in order to stay big. They were selfish and only thought of themselves. No one thought of us: being young and being put down. They only saw our talent, a threat to them.

They’ve not only insulted us, they continued and continued to spread lies about us over and over again. Lies they wanted to believe in so badly. Cause again: our talent was a threat to them.

Two painful years would arrive where we’d go to school, just to hide in the toilet in between breaks and wince every time we’d pass someone who believed in those lies. Constantly degrading ourselves cause that was the only way to stay at least a bit in the group.

And then we were alone. Purely lonely. Lonelier than the word loneliness can even express. We’ve spent all breaks either on the toilet, crunched down so no one would see our shoes under the door or hidden in the smallest corner of the library where only books had their places which were untouched and not even registered in the computer yet. Classes were no room where we’d study something anymore cause the whispering got louder than the teacher’s screaming and grades rapidly fell down as we had no one to ask for last classes’ notes. We’ve got sicker and sicker and it was not even our body, it was our mind that lost hope and lust.

Our best friend died and we didn’t even have someone to talk about it in school. Told the library lady then finally and we made her promise three times to not tell anyone else cause we were so scared that even the ones that cared after we left would not take death seriously and so we sacrificed all silence that was left inside our loud-beating suffering heart. No word should ever come out again.

The apparent Berlin trip everyone looked forward became non-existent for us cause we didn’t go. We begged our mum to let us stay and the doctor to give us a description. One more day until summer holidays and three more years of this torture.

Summer 2019 was one of Lana Del Rey singing about Summertime Sadness, Girl In Red about seeing ourselves dead in the pool, and us writing one of our deepest and saddest books ever written. One we’ll never share in its original edition. We've dreamed of running away, changing our name and we crushed it over celebrities who were too old to be our lover and we were too young to see that we cried for help. We cried for ourselves to finally notice our terrible misery. To finally step up for ourselves and our mental health. To break free. The end of that summer arrived too soon. And again, I think that we wished for that summer to never come to an end. But it did. We went back to our school without having run away, changed our name or dropped off school. This was our last year of school, so our decision at that time.

I know we don't want to write about what happened in those last two days in that school because we still haven't processed it yet. And that's okay. That's valid.

Fast forward somehow we ended up having changed our name, schools, and life in October ‘19. We called us Bonnie Orbison because Bonnie was the name of our protagonist in our latest book (the one that ran away) and Orbison because Roy’s voice was the calmest we could listen to at that time (and he sang about mystery girls and we dreamt of being one so badly). Somehow we ended up in a room full of new people who had no idea what we've just went through, and most importantly, comfortingly all 30 classmates had no idea who we were. That felt good.

We proceeded six months of getting along and eventually finding people who loved us for us just being us. I don't want to think about what would have happened if we didn't find those few precious human beings. And then the world stopped, all came to stand still, we were locked in with only ourselves. Classes online was still impossible because no one was prepared for this.

So we had time.

First, this time was no good. We fell back in the frightening black hole of summer sadness and we were afraid of dreaming ourselves dead in the pool once again. But we stepped up, reminded ourselves that we had changed our life. We weren’t the person from last summer anymore, we hopefully would never become it again.

We stepped up. We took a piece of paper and a pen and we did the little thing what Tim told me told us to never give up: We wrote. We wrote everything down that happened to us. And we sent it to a friend, one that had no idea yet that we held such heavy thing in our locked heart. The moment we sent it away, we threw up. But after he read it and talked to us about it, it felt good having opened up, we realised that we were never alone. So many people are struggling with harassment and depression.

And then slowly we became us again, we became the first version of who I am right now.

We remembered our dream of having published one book of ourselves at age 15, with four months left to achieve this dream. And you bet we freaking did it!

Tabea at whatever past version I'm writing to, I'm so proud of you! Sooooooooooo proud!! I don't care that we started a charting podcast and met legends we always dreamt of. I don't care that we wrote so many novels and published one or two. I don't care that we haven't figured out so much of life yet.

I care that we live,

I care that we breathe.

I care that we sit here on our dad's bed and write this.

I care that we finally met people who truly care about us and are glad that we care about them as well.

I care that we finally come to terms of our past so that we can move on and most importantly, can live with those lessons and experiences. Because without them we wouldn't be here because those are the reason why we are who we are. And I have to say we’re pretty dope and legendary.

So wherever you are right now, I want you to close your eyes and dream of yourself with a smile on your beautiful face. Because it is possible. We've become who we truly always dreamt of becoming and this will continue for the rest of our lifetime.

Yours truly, xoxo