To My Child at 25

You are twenty-five. I am thinking about what that looks like.

Not the details – I can't know those, and I wouldn't want to. But the shape of it. You, wherever you are, whatever you are doing, with whatever particular intensity you bring to the thing that currently has hold of you. Some part of me suspects the intensity is the same. It was always one of the most recognisable things about you – the way you were fully in whatever you were in, with no halfway. If you were interested, you were entirely interested. If you were upset, the upset was total. If you loved something, the love was specific and complete and probably permanent.

I want you to know what these years were.

They were hard in ways I didn't always have the language for. Not because of you – I want to be exact about this, because I spent a long time getting it wrong inside my own head and I don't want you to carry even a trace of the wrong version. Not because of you. Because of the gap between who you were and what the world reliably offered. Because the environments you spent your days in were not designed for the way your nervous system works, and the cost of that landed on you and on us and on every evening for years. Because I spent a significant portion of this time learning – slowly, imperfectly, always a little behind you – how to meet you where you actually were rather than where I thought you should be.

There were evenings when I got it very wrong. I need you to know that I know that. Not as confession – I hope by the time you are twenty-five there is nothing between us that requires confessing – but as clarity. The moments when my own nervous system ran out and I became something you needed to be careful of, rather than the person you could come to. The times I reached for the wrong response and watched it fail and reached for it again anyway. The nights I went to bed carrying what that day had cost you and what part of it had been mine to own.

You always forgave me before I had finished repairing. I noticed that. It meant something I have never fully found the words for.

What I want you to know about who you were, from where I was standing:

You saw things nobody else saw. Not metaphorically – literally. You registered the world at a resolution that most people don't have access to, and it cost you, and it was also extraordinary. The things that overloaded you were the same things that made you notice how light moves in the late afternoon, and remember every detail of a conversation from four years ago, and love the specific things you loved with a fidelity that other people spend their whole lives trying to find.

Your honesty was one of the hardest and best things about you. You had no architecture for saying what you didn't mean. This made you exhausting and essential. In a world full of managed surfaces, you were always actual.

The way you loved the things you loved – not casually, not as a phase, but completely and permanently and with a specificity that meant you always knew exactly what you were talking about – was a lesson I am still absorbing. The world is full of people who love things generally. You were never capable of that.

You taught me things about my own nervous system that I would not have learned any other way. Things about what I am capable of – more than I knew – and about where my limits are, and about what repair looks like when you practise it enough times that it starts to feel like the truest thing you do. I understand patience differently because of you. I understand what it means to come back after the hard moments because we did it so many times that it became the thing I am most certain of.

I hope by twenty-five you understand more about the years that were difficult. Not only that they were difficult – I suspect you remember that. But why. The way your nervous system was working through those years. The way the world required things of it that cost more than other nervous systems pay for the same things. The way home was where the cost landed – which was both a weight and a sign of something I hold now as one of the most important things I was ever given: you trusted us enough to fall apart with us.

"The falling apart was not the problem. The falling apart was the trust."

I hope you know that the falling apart was not the problem.

The falling apart was the trust.

I hope you are somewhere that your nervous system is understood – by you first, and then by the people around you. I hope you have found at least one or two people who know how to hold you at full volume, who are not frightened by the intensity and do not ask you to turn it down. I hope the world has caught up with you, even a little.

I hope you are proud of yourself.

Not for what you achieved or managed or overcame – though I hope those things too, in their own time. But for who you were, even when who you were was hard to be and hard to be with. For the honesty. For the depth. For the way you were always actually yourself, even when it cost you.

I was proud of you for that at seven. At ten. At fourteen and all the ages in between that required more than they should have.

You were always worth every bit of this.

I want you to know that – not as a thing parents say, but as the truest account I have of what these years actually were.

Worth it. All of it.

Every single hard evening.

Every repair.

Every Tuesday I sat in the car and found a way back in.

Every bit.