Have you ever thought about what you would tell your teenage self if you had the chance? A new website called Dear Teen Me: Letters to Our Teen Selves gives authors the chance to give their readers a little glimpse into their teenage lives.
Here’s a blurb from the About section of the site:
Teenagers of the world, Dear Teen Me is for you.
For everyone who wishes they were on the football team. For everyone who would rather be in the glee club than ever run another lap. For the teens who dream of being far, far away from the small town or big city where they go to school. The prom queens, the theater kids, the band geeks, the bad boys, the good girls, the loners, the stoners, the class presidents, the juvenile delinquents, the jocks and the nerds.
The teens who have good days and bad days and sometimes really really really bad days.
This is for you.
Signed,
A group of authors. some famous – some up-and-comers, who care about you.
In honor of this awesome site, last night’s #YAlitchat was dedicated to a discussion of what you would tell your teenage self. Some of the tweets were laugh out loud funny, others were achingly sad and some just offered up solid advice that every teenager could benefit from.
Here’s what I came up with to tell my teenage self last night during the Twitter chat:
Dear Teen Me: Reading IS cool. Later, you’ll find a whole community of bookworms like you.
Dear Teen Me: You’ll never be the lead in the musical, but don’t worry. Writing’s your thing, not singing and dancing.
Dear Teen Me: Learn to drive on highways. Just do it. Little do you know, six years later you’ll still have that fear!
Dear Teen Me: Stop feeling inferior to others. You go on to do amazing things!
Dear Teen Me: Life (or high school) is too short for toxic friendships. Drop her. She doesn’t turn out to be that cool anyway.
This website (and the tweets from last night) are a great source of inspiration for those who write YA (or want to write YA). Reading through the tweets and the letters on the website brought back a ton of memories from my teenage years and gave me ideas for several different plot lines. Pretty cool, right?
In addition to the letters written by so many awesome authors, there are also hilariously epic teenage photos of some of the authors. Oh, and the fun part is, you have to guess who you think the photos are of. Awesome.
What would you tell your teenage self? Share in the comments. I can’t wait to see what you come up with!
Dear Teen Me:
Stop writing about your personal life on the internet. You’re going to forget your login information and the blog will still be up when you’re in your twenties. The mortification is not worth it.
@Clementine Bojangles, Hahahaa, OH GEEZ! You were never able to get the blogging site to shut it down?!
Dear Teen Me,
Oh wait, you’ve still got a year left of being a teenager but that’s okay, you went through a lot of crappy things in your early years; you learned you could get past all of that and you’re stronger now because of it. Your later teen years will turn out to be much better as you’ll finally be comfortable with yourself (keyword: yourself. boys are a different story!) By the way, don’t feel bad about dropping your ex-best friend. She proved herself to be a flake and unworthy of your awesomeness. Stick with that crazy, outgoing girl with the red hair; now SHE is best-friend material 🙂
@Sandy, Thanks for sharing, Sandy! 🙂 It seems like you’ve learned A LOT about yourself already and you’re not even through your teen years! Super jealous…it took me way longer than that! Go you!