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You wake up tomorrow morning and its your 18th birthday again.

3K views 61 replies 38 participants last post by  Mlt18 
#1 ·
You wake up tomorrow morning and its your 18th birthday again. What advice would you give to yourself on what you should do, not do, mistakes to avoid, risks you should be willing to take. etc. What would be your best words of wisdom you would give yourself?
 
#2 ·
I am a moderator here so I cannot be honest and post what I'd tell myself if this happened to me.

Slightly off-topic. It occurs to me that if you want people to take your advice, you are actually at their mercy. They cannot make you happy unless they take the advice you want to give them. And an extension of that is this - The best advice is usually the advice nobody wants. If you think about it, even the best advice is usually not given unless the intended recipient of it is closed off and not receptive to it. Good advice is usually just plain common sense. And so, the intended recipient usually does not need someone else to give them common sense advice they already know.

There are things I'd probably try to tell my younger self if I could but at the same time, I think it would be a waste of time. My older "wiser" self is living in the same brain and I remember exactly what I was like back then and lots of people gave me lots of really good advice that I knew was really good advice that I didn't take because I didn't want to. I knew it was good advice and I knew that I was going to regret not taking it but I didn't care.
 
#11 ·
I am a moderator here so I cannot be honest and post what I'd tell myself if this happened to me.
Ha! Yeah! Same here. I can't post the only sensible thing I could tell myself knowing what I know now, it'd break site rules. :stu

I've learned absolutely nothing in the past...*opens calculator*...26 years that would've changed the outcome significantly enough to matter. I don't remember my 18th birthday but I can safely assume I was lonely and isolated and miserable because that's been pretty much every birthday since at least my early teens (probably earlier, in fact, because even when I had consistent friends, in school only, they didn't celebrate my birthday with me). I've been hopelessly broken since around age 12 or so and every year I've only gotten worse, in fact I was likely just born defective and never stood a chance. Nothing has helped me. Nothing can help me. A much older, much more bitter, much more hopeless me visiting my younger self would have only one kind of advice to offer and I'm sure it's not the kind of advice this thread is asking about.

All the things that everyone else says they would've done differently are things that I either could not have done, being the way I am, or things that were never available to me in the first place.

For example it's pretty easy to advise yourself to "Go out and make friends" when you had/have the ability to go out and find compatible people to befriend and have the ability to talk to and trust and befriend them plus they want to befriend you and they actually plan to stick with it rather than lose interest in you after a short while and move on. That's an awful lot of abilities you need to have and an awful lot of variables that need to play out just right. That's also the same kind of "advice" therapists spent years giving me and it didn't make a difference then, either, because I didn't have those abilities or those options and there's no advice that can magically make such things appear.

Apparently, therapists around here haven't caught on to this. Plus when one lacks those abilities and options, it's apparently solely their fault...

 
(it's my fault I was born prematurely which may have affected my mental and social development, my fault I was painfully shy and sensitive from birth, my fault people (including family) ridiculed and criticized me for that, my fault my childhood was so isolated and my only chance to meet people was in the school environment (which ended around age 18-19), my fault I lack(ed) transportation to "get out there," my fault my mother couldn't take time off work to take me to my driver's ed final, my fault we lacked money to buy me a car, my fault I live in a rural area with few prospects, my fault I'm too crippled by anxiety to work, my fault I have no employable skills in an area that lacks jobs anyway, my fault everyone around me is too impatient to teach my slow slogging error-prone self basic life skills, my fault I'm thus dependent on others, my fault I can't "just move somewhere else," my fault I was repeatedly mocked and rejected by my peers as a child and teen and then online as an adult, my fault I have boring interests nobody else is into, my fault I have no desire to make pointless smalltalk that goes nowhere, my fault I can't form meaningful connections with others, my fault nobody else is interested or patient enough to want to stay friends with me, my fault that repeated horrible experiences trying to socialize have made me avoidant and distrustful and afraid, my fault that it takes two to maintain a friendship and so far, with just one exception, not any one other person I actually managed to befriend has wished to maintain the friendship and they often turned on me in a painful and humiliating manner before ending it (or even just stopped replying, cold, without explanation), my fault I likely have underlying undiagnosed mental conditions that inhibit my social abilities, my fault I lack access to adequate mental health treatment, my fault there's no adequate mental health treatment available in this area anyway, my fault that the time I did try to get help the specialists had no ability to help me, my fault that the support groups were too full or unavailable to me, my fault that the mental health clinic was understaffed and overbooked and never had enough time for even the bare minimum of consistent therapy for me, my fault that they cut funding and services and had to focus on more promising clients, my fault that my Medicaid coverage ran out, my fault that the therapists had to shrug and cut me loose despite knowing I have self-harmful thoughts, my fault that the last psychologist told me she doubted I'd get any better (which she also blamed on me) and not to bother reapplying for treatment in the future, my fault that this clearly indicated to me that I'm unimportant and expendable, my fault that when I tried to reach out for help again a different psychiatrist told me, "No, no, no," my fault that 30+ years of this has left me distrustful and broken and bitter, I'm sure I'm forgetting some things...even when the other party involved in failed social experiences made a promise to reach out or respond and then did not follow through after I did all the work, well, according to the therapist that was also somehow my fault...entirely my fault)


...so the entirety of the failure is on their shoulders...and going through that again and again and again tends to hammer home the message that there's just no point. And oh, if I try to explain any of this I'm just a whiner who likes being miserable and doesn't try hard enough (if I try and fail) and expects too much (if the other party lets me down), so...yeah. That's the advice I got from the experts.

So nah...I have no "advice." My life would play out on the same lonely, isolated, miserable path it already did, just with the foreknowledge of how hopeless/pointless it'd be.
 
#4 ·
I would be extremely depressed if I had to be 18 again and do this all over lol.

Plus idk if I'd take my advice. The only way for me to be better is to have a personality change. I guess I can let myself know to avoid certain people because I know the outcome now and maybe that'll save me some grief.
 
#13 ·
Perhaps the screwup has learned some valuable lessons from their failures they could pass on to their younger self.

But yes in general you should take advice from people who have a demonstrated history of making good decisions and knowing what they are talking about
 
#8 ·
Talk to girl, bitcoin good, die in fiery plane crash before getting old.
 
#10 ·
Are we going back in time or am I just going to be young now? Could tell myself to buy some bitcoins etc (at the correct time obviously.)



I mean I'm not going to be able to give myself any useful advice for anything else lol.
 
#12 ·
Wait, all I can do is talk to my old self? Fat load of good that's going to do. With a bit of prep though. lottery numbers and investment advice could pay off big. Wouldn't fix any of my core issues, but a life of luxury and indulgence might actually be worth living, unlike this purgatory I'm in at the prime of my life.
 
#15 ·
I'm pretty okay where life has taken me, I would tell past zonebox to just be the best zonebox that a zonebox could possibly be. I think the past me would appreciate that, and well, it would be pretty solid advice that would be agreeable. The only advice I would really want to give my past self would not be for my benefit, but for that of my younger brother. I would try to prevent him from ever touching any drugs, to stay away from a particular love interest he had that had lead him toward his drug habit.



If I were to be 18 again, well, I would just enjoy life.
 
#22 ·
Yep give myself some great investment tips.

if you'd been able to buy Microsoft at the $21 per stock IPO back in 1986 by picking up 100 shares, today you'd be basking in $750,000.

Not to mention what you Amazon or Netflix shares would be worth. You could have your own private island!
 
#17 ·
I was having lots of suicidal thoughts on my 18th birthday. I don't know that I'd have been able to take in anything from my current self, but I'd like to say "You're not a bad person. You're feeling anxious and overwhelmed and you're not making it up or being weak. You need and deserve help and that's perfectly ok. Your current psychologist is a nutcase but the next one will be alright. He's not good at reading between the lines though so you'll have to directly tell him things even if you think it should be obvious. It'll feel a lot better if you say directly what you're thinking and how you're feeling rather than obscuring it in layers so that it doesn't sound pathetic. Try saying some stuff and see how it goes. I promise it won't be pathetic, no matter how anyone responds. Or you could decide not to talk to him, then harbor a wish that you'd been able to talk to him for, say... the next decade. You'll get another shot with talking to him then if you'd like, but maybe just try and fast track it for us hey?"
 
#18 ·
Definitely would've disciplined myself to get my GED way sooner as well as get a job and a license. I had a pretty late start to all this and more. Also definitely would've tried to be more assertive and confident towards people even though my social skills were/are garbage.
 
#21 ·
I wouldn't want to wake up at 18 in 2020. In the 70s or 80s, sure. That would be a great time. Or maybe in 2050+, wake up at 18 in the post apocalyptic world, scavenge the old buildings to find food or shelter, and old relics of the past and sell that for ammo.
 
#23 ·
Dear 18 year old Chad, you're going to be graduating high school, that girl you liked well she'll end up with another guy but she won't matter later. You'll discover in a few years you have these things called anxiety and depression which will introduce you to a place called SAS where you'll meet her and fall in love, it will only last 3 years but she'll be your first. You'll also join a real life anxiety group where you'll meet the guys who are now your not so close anymore friends.

Don't worry though because while you're at the group you'll also meet someone else you'll come to love very deeply and she's still in your life right now. College ? you didn't really get there you went to school for acting which you thought was your vocation in life but you let someone talk you out of it. Chad things are going to get abit rough in the two years before I type this, someone you love is going to get sick and is going to need you to take care of them. Keeping the job you had would have made things alot easier of course but you'll manage and your relationship with them will grow stronger.

Oh you'll also make a life changing discovery about yourself and who you really are. That one s a shocker. You're going to survive it though, you'll even learn to forgive him for what he did. Chad also make better choices with friends, don't envy J, he's immature and he goes after troubled women with issues of their own, he may come across as a guy women like but real women with self respect can see right through him.
 
#24 ·
The only piece of advice I would give anybody at any age is to learn how to manage your depression. That is by far the biggest obstacle between improvement and being stuck. I would tell my 18 year-old self "the sooner you learn how to manage your depression the sooner you'll experience what you've always desired. Depression is the only thing you should focus on everything else will follow."
@tehuti88 I can relate to your post in the sense that most of these issues are not self inflicted. I was probably born with a certain degree of autism because I never made friends growing up, I was constantly bullied and to this day it's very hard for me to understand how most people where able to do so much socially where all I did was enjoy my time isolated from the world. Socializing does not come natural to me it's something I have to force myself to do. Even as an adult I have to remind myself that isolation isn't healthy although it feels natural to me. The combination of autism and trauma completely destroyed my life before I was aware of what was even happening to me so it is definitely not unreasonable to believe that some people where always destined to suffer and be alone. It doesn't mean we can't change but it does mean that we have to try 2x harder then the average person to experience a normal life.

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#27 · (Edited)
The combination of autism and trauma completely destroyed my life before I was aware of what was even happening to me so it is definitely not unreasonable to believe that some people where always destined to suffer and be alone. It doesn't mean we can't change but it does mean that we have to try 2x harder then the average person to experience a normal life.

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Yep totally agree.
 
#25 ·
As far as what I needed right then, I'd tell myself to be serious about college as far as getting use out of it, or don't go at all. I just went on auto-pilot because it was expected and it wasn't fair to do that. Plus, get a job.
 
#26 ·
I would tell myself to take a deep breath, relax, and enjoy the date I had that day. Also don't answer the phone when she calls in the evening the following day. Hit her back Saturday morning. I mean it, don't answer that call. I would also suggest actually taking time out to see if the university life is what 18 year old me really wanted. And if my major was what I really wanted. Another thing is to spend more time with my little sister when I'm back home. Lastly I would tell them that if I ever felt unsure or nervous about anything, to not suppress the feeling, but actually talk about it with my uncle, cousin, best friend at the time, or even a therapist if it comes to that. Take another deep breath for the road ahead.
 
#28 ·
1.)That relationship will be a blessing in disguise even if it doesn't seem like it. Keep pushing forward.
2.) Start learning to say "no" NOW
3.) You can't change people, you can only change how you react to them. Don't let anyone manipulate you.
4.) Do NOT take that job...

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#32 ·
You need to shoot yourself, no point dragging it out, although your soul will become much more salty & maybe that's the point : /..... God likes licking salty souls.
 
#34 ·
18 again

I tend to agree that an 18 yr old will believe that no older person knows what they are talking about unless this is a person only a few years older. However, I think at 18 I would love to hear from my future self. Here is what I would say:

1) The worst thing in this world is human inhumanity to humans -that probably will not change so you should try to understand others as well as possible in order to avoid the worst cases and know that the inhumane are just that and it has nothing to do with you.
2) Dont let your emotions rule your mind and find out more about that person you are attracted too before getting too close. All that shines is not gold. Dont treat it like an interview but kind of treat it like an interview - you want to find out as much as possible about the other person whether it is as a friend or as a lover, before you get close.
3) Most people are busy thinking about themselves so do as much as you can to make others feel good about themselves. This uplifts them while also making you more popular and helping others is one of our main purposes in life.
4) We live in a high consumption economy. Do not fall victim to it. Most of what is for sale is not what you need, won't last or is just a plain waste of money. Stuff is stuff and it is worth less than half of what you have paid for it as soon as you buy it so only buy stuff that you love and makes you happy not because everyone has one, etc. You will eventually have too much stuff so try to minmize the waste.
5) Stay close to family - unless they are truly toxic - you only have one family member who is truly toxic. Try to understand who that is now and keep your distance; do not share personal details because they will be used against you.
6) Find older people you admire and ask them to mentor you along your path. If they say they are not a counselor then say "exactly!" This wont be easy so maybe start by asking questions to understand others better and find out who's counsel you think fits. Schools assign advisors and work assigns managers but choose your own in order to get the best help and seek their opinions as needed - you have to be willing to share the bad stuff to make this work and then you have to be open to listening.
7) Listen more.
8) Exercise at least 3 times per week - body, mind, spirit connection.
9) Pray not for what you want but for understanding what God wants from you and be thankful.
10) Gratitude for all that you have - write down 3 good things about your life every day. Or at least once a week.
 
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