Dear Daughter
Dear Daughter,
What a year it has been! Despite the uncertainty, the frozen screens mid-Zoom call, the mask mandates, and all the other unnamed trickiness, HERE. YOU. ARE. The end of the school year.
Part of growing up into an adult includes having mentors and guides to help you find your way through the wilderness. As a person who cares very much about your safety and well-being, I’ve compiled some questions and suggestions on how to move forward. I want to give you the gift of helping you reflect on the past year, make meaning of your life so far, and set intentions for your future.
Cast a vision
An important part of growing up and becoming the person you want to be is bringing conscious awareness to the things that matter most to you (what you value). If goals are destinations on a map, values are the compass guiding your actions. Values are aspects of life that are important to you. There’s no black and white with values, only the perfect shade of your favorite color (you get to pick the color just like you get to pick your values). You never “reach” your values, you just get to live into them and move towards them.
To jump start process of discovering and clarifying your values, ask yourself:
What are my parents’ values?
What are the values of adults in my life who I most trust and respect?
Which values of your parents or trusted adults meant the most to you?
What were the most important life lessons you learned so far in your life?
When you make important life decisions, what parts of life do you consider (family, friends, faith community, work, personal growth)?
Focus on Today
If the future seems too big and distant to consider, that’s ok (and you are normal). Let’s start with a single day.
How do you want to feel at the end of the day? Set your phone down. Sit for a moment. Call up within you, the quality of the feeling you want to feel. Do you want to feel peaceful, content, proud, respected, noticed? Or, perhaps, connected, refreshed, and hopeful?
What do you want to have happened throughout the day that will support you in finding and living within this feeling?
Releasing Others from Impacting Your Self-Worth
Release your family, peers, and teachers from the pressure to enact your vision. It’s a radical act to release other people from the job of providing the feeling you want. Give others the freedom to be and act as they will. They are going to do that anyway.
As long as you let someone else be a part of the equation, you will not have true authority over your feeling of self-worth. If how you feel about yourself is dependent on something someone does or does not do, you will forever be second-guessing your worth and most likely end up feeling disappointed. Find self-worth from a place that is intrinsic and has nothing to do with someone else's actions, accomplishments, and life. If your worth is related to someone else, it depends on them.
When you relate your self-worth to something within yourself, the ownership is yours. No one can take it away.
Delight in Your Awesomeness
You are unique and worthy of love and respect. Celebrate yourself. Where are you absolutely slaying it? What five things are you doing as a person in this world that are worthy of being noticed by you? Own these.
Turning Towards Grief
This past year was ROUGH! Being a high school student in a pandemic? No thank you, but you did it.
Take a moment to grieve.
Spend time telling the truth about what you lost: support, friends, opportunities. Acknowledging and grieving what was lost is an important part of recovering from a big life event (such as a pandemic, loss of a loved one, etc.). Think of grief as a heavy bag you are carrying. Purposeful grieving is a practice of stopping, setting down, and looking in the bag.
A guided grieving practice:
Acknowledge the suffering, the loss, the confusion, the unknown-ness and unfairness of it all.
Locate the quality of sadness in your body. Where is it located? If this is causing distress or it feels like too much (on a scale from 1 to 10, and you are above a 5, it feels like too much), take a break from this practice for now to take away the immediate intensity.
Sit with discomfort in the presence of a “safe-other”. You can even coach your friend/loved-one to just sit shoulder-to-shoulder with you in silence or to occasionally say, “I see your suffering. I’m here with you.”
After a time, shift your thoughts and feelings to a known experience where you overcame something difficult. You might think, “I’ve been through something like this before. This is how I got through it.”
Let your mind slide back and forth, moving between spaces of known and unknown, of sadness and joy, of loneliness and connection.
End the practice with a positive memory. Let go of the memory, but stay with the felt sense of having gotten through and survived. Notice the quality of this sensation. Acknowledge this location as a sacred space within you.
The feeling of grief and sadness can be cared for if you know how. When an uncomfortable felt sense has been tended to, you may notice a physical sensation of something softening or being eased. Something stifled can breathe; something comes unstuck or uncramped; a shift occurs; something relaxes that was once constricted. You may notice the impulse to finally exhale, letting out a sigh of relief.
Sometimes we feel so bad that we come to accept this uncomfortable feeling as the basic state of things.
Please know: A bad feeling is the body knowing and pushing toward something right.
Something Good is Looking for You
This quote, attributed to the thirteenth-century Persian poet, Rumi, is one of my favorites. If you live your day believing that there are positive opportunities, meaningful experiences, well-meaning people in pursuit of YOU, what would you try?
You, as a Wise Elder
Imagine yourself as the oldest person in your family and community. You spend your days contentedly on the front porch swing. When younger children gather around you, how will you tell them you made it through the pandemic? What mattered? What didn't? What was your beauty? Who was there for you? What never changed despite the uncertainty?
In Closing
Daughter, this year will go down in history. May you fail at returning to the old normal if it did not serve your best interests. May you be extraordinarily bad at clinging to “the way things used to be.” Here is your invitation to co-create a new normal that is available to us all (pandemic or not).
There is wisdom within you.
May you be awful at being unkind to yourself. May your choices make no sense to the the cool kids and influencers. May you find and live into your values in a way that confuses those in power and troubles the narrative of what it means to be a “good girl.” May you be compliant only to your truest self when the world is asking for your blind obedience.
There is an opportunity to cut a new path even if it’s just finding that first foot-hold.
May you be a catalyst for boldness for the girls you sit shoulder-to-shoulder with in the lunch rooms, science labs, and gymnasium bleachers - with stunning displays of asking for (demanding) what you most desire to satiate all your hungers.
There is room for hunger and fullness within you.
This year was the loud-mouth sister to all the other years you’ve lived so far (even louder than 2015 when we moved you across the country and back). She refused to behave. Take note. Some years are like that. Life is full of moments, there are seasons of quiet, calm, expectancy, and cycles of chaos, loudness, and surprise.
May you and your friends feel the love and support of all the women who have gone before you. May you indulge in the practice of checking in with yourself. May you always know and believe in your worth. No matter what.
Moms and teen daughters, are you looking for more support? You are in luck! I’m getting ready to start my third cohort of the Brave Body Group for Girls and Support Circle for Moms (June 2021).
Community and a sense of belonging is an important part of finding balance and healing our relationships with food and our bodies. My intention is to offer a space for mothers and a separate space for daughter to learn about what true health, beauty, value, worth, and identity is. Not what culture says it is. Not what Instagram and Facebook are telling us. Our daughters, together, sharing and hearing each other’s stories that affirm “You are not alone. It’s not just you.” And we mothers, doing the same. In a world of warring words and quick, jagged replies, we need as much love and support as we can find right now. You are invited to a space for just this: Brave Body Group for Girls + Support Circle for Moms, Virtual Group. I'm look forward to partnering with you!
The lessons will be guided through a proven curriculum created over the past 20 years by The Body Positive. Learning in a group setting will allow for true success because success is not defined as a static end goal of individualized perfection, but as a way of living that offers permission to love and care for one's self and each other.
Click here to learn more!