I would shout loudly to the world
I would have sung louder,
Smiled brighter
given harder
seen beauty quicker
shared smiles more often
hugged harder
loved better
I would learn to play my soul better
I would paint teardrops so I could find happiness easier
I would have danced with more abandon and with more people
And also rejoiced in dancing alone
I would laugh at the small problems so I could help solve the big ones
I would
see dreams in clouds and taste the future in morning dew
I would find thoughts profound in flames
And see the wondrous beauty in a small rock, a leaf, a single blade of grass in a piece of bark upon a tree.
From this I would know what makes a view majestic and a soul so small yet so big
I would worship the spirits of the untainted ones, the children, the meek, those unable to protect themselves
I would strive to heal the evils of the world and learn to love with an open hand
I would learn to write songs of humility and to plant seeds of hope and healing
Then I would turn to the one who asked the question and say
What about you? What will you change?
What should I tell you?
Dance, love, sing, be balanced, fall over, get back up, make the world a better place, play music, write, act, build, fall in love. With everyone, but mostly fall in love with yourself.
Best,
Richard
Sharon Lewin is a professor, infectious diseases physician and scientist, and is internationally renowned for her research into all aspects of HIV disease and pathogenesis. She is the director of The Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity, a joint venture of the University of Melbourne and Royal Melbourne Hospital, and was named Melburnian of the Year in 2014 for her achievements in her field.
To my teenage self,
No matter how you are feeling right now – overwhelmed with school, fitting in with friends and being understood by family – exciting and unexpected opportunities and challenges but also great things lie ahead for everyone. Never forget that.
When I was your age and living in suburban Melbourne in 1975, I felt trapped in a boring place which seemed far, far away from where things were really happening. Who could have imagined how the world would change in the next 30 years? Melbourne is now a city with its own distinctive style. Melbourne now leads in design, research, sport, food and fashion, and at the same time embraces diversity and inclusion in all it does. It’s a city I greatly enjoy and am now immensely proud to live in. At the same time, through advances in technology, the world has also now come to us. So your world now is likely to be a very different world in the future, one you might have never imagined.
A few words of advice for managing the changing world ahead …
The great adventures and successes in life come to people who are open to others, open to change and open to hard work. So embrace the opportunities that come to you and always say ‘yes’ whenever you can. ‘Yes’ should be the default position.
Be kind – to everyone. When I was five, my mum insisted I always say ‘yes’ to every party invitation – no matter who it was or whether I would know anyone there. From as early as I can remember, this was the rule. Be kind to everyone you meet in life or in work. Other people’s stories are always inspiring.
At times, life can seem overwhelming. It’s hard to know how to manage your time to juggle study (and later work) and play effectively but it’s important to get right. At times, it seems easier to just shut yourself off from the rest of the world when you are under pressure and just focus on one thing. But life is never like that. We are always part of a larger community and world. This difficult juggle will continue forever so learning a balance that works is important. None of us get it right all the time.
Enjoy the journey in life – not just the destination. At different times in life, priorities will change. This may seem a distraction but don’t resent this. You may need to alter the balance of life along the way but that’s part of the journey to enjoy.
Follow your passion. People excel in their careers and in life when they are doing what they love or what they care about. I know not everyone is lucky enough to find that but if you can, and can make money too, treasure that. A successful career in medicine and science, for me, often required extremely hard work, long hours and some sacrifice. This is much easier to do if you are passionate about what you do.
Family and friends always come first. Never miss a major life event for a friend or family member. Doesn’t matter where or when or how inconvenient, make every effort to be there.
Travel as much as you can. Travel is even better with a safe and enriching home base. Travel introduces you to new aesthetics, new ways of looking at the world and most importantly, new people. It is also a reminder that despite all our differences there is a common humanity in the world. Regardless of where you live, your colour, your religion, all human life is equal and everyone deserves respect. Growing up in a rich country means we have an opportunity, perhaps a responsibility, to give back and try to eliminate that inequality.
Make sure you live somewhere different from where you grew up – anywhere will be wonderful but spending time in a place at the epicentre of whatever you are interested in can be transformative. For me, in HIV medicine in the late 90s, that was the Rockefeller University in New York. This was the beginning of life-saving treatments for people living with HIV and New York was where much of this research was happening. Moving to New York with my husband and two young children seemed a tremendous hassle at the time but the benefits personally, professionally and as a family stay with us all forever.
As a woman, there will always be extra pressures on you. I doubt this will ever change. Even with the great advances in equality for women, which I have enjoyed in my own career, there are still many additional challenges for women. See these as extra advantages and opportunities, not drawbacks. Having a family and perhaps remaining the primary caregiver is a great privilege with immense rewards; being able to combine that with a career too is an even greater joy.
And finally, as Mary Schmich, a journalist for the Chicago Tribune (and not Kurt Vonnegut), famously once wrote for a hypothetical commencement speech (which you should read), wear sunscreen! The scientists were right – it works! It will keep you looking young. If only we had been told that in the 70s!
Copyright Mike Baker
Shaun Tan is an artist, writer and filmmaker. He won an Academy Award for The Lost Thing, a 2011 animated film adaptation of a picture book he wrote and illustrated in 2000, and he has published many other acclaimed books such as The Red Tree and The Arrival. He was born in Fremantle, Western Australia, in 1974 and grew up in the northern suburbs of Perth.
What should I say to you, my thirteen-year-old self?
Well, I can’t believe how young you look in that picture, not really thirteen, more like a little kid. Actually, I do recall that this was a slight problem at the time, compounded by being unusually short. (I still am, sorry to say, nothing much changes! Your hair is a lot thinner, that’s about it.) I know that your appearance makes you particularly self-conscious at a time when self-consciousness is probably your defining neurosis – you are even self-conscious about being self-conscious, and self-conscious about that too, and so on. Being half-Chinese in suburban WA in the 1980s, a place and time when it is rather uncool to be Asian in any way, offers no great advantage. But hey, believe it or not, being mixed race is a good thing here in the twenty-first century. Multiculturalism has come a long way, in spite of setbacks. As a writer and illustrator (which is what you end up doing – as an actual job, crazy huh?) you will get asked all the time about your cultural identity, in a positive light. Yeah, I know, try telling that to teenagers throwing beer cans and slurs a
t you from a passing car on your way to school! Never mind those idiots, they only want you to acknowledge their idiocy. Times change and society moves on, so that’s one bit of good news. The future is just another word for hope. Being a nerd actually turns out to be a good thing too – you end up winning an Oscar for it. I know, it’s nuts.
But yes, there is quite a chasm between then and now. Can you believe that I/you/we are old enough now to have been thirteen three times over? Yikes. I realise I could have learned quite a few other languages in that time, as proficiently as English, but I’m still boringly monolingual. So try and learn another language maybe. Chinese would be handy. Actually now that I think about it, you are learning Chinese at thirteen, but you can’t see the point and will stop in a couple of years to study other things. Note to present-day self: still time to learn Chinese.
On the other hand, you just never know what you are going to need. My wife is Finnish (spoiler alert!) so now I’m learning Finnish, alongside my two-year-old daughter (spoiler alert!). Alas, Finnish is not exactly on the curriculum at Balcatta High in Western Australia circa 1987. This could have been erittäin kätevä (very handy). Instead you are going to spend long hours studying physics and higher mathematics in senior high school, only to find that you can’t even do long division at forty, and that you were never really suited to engineering. As an artist (final spoiler I promise) you just don’t need to know that much about sinewaves, algebra or how much a bowling ball weighs in a descending lift. Actually that’s not true: I’ve referred to maths and physics quite a bit when writing at least one book, so who knows about these things. Education of any kind is rarely a waste of time. All I can suggest is, ‘the broader the better’. Take an interest in everything. You never know what you will need later on.
From Tales from Outer Suburbia, Allen & Unwin, 2008
The future, like hope, is unpredictable. Any advice from older to younger versions of one’s self – and by extension to any other younger person, which is the real purpose of this letter I imagine – is a tricky business. I can’t advise you, the thirteen-year-old, much on content without disrupting the whole experience or else appearing mightily out of touch (we live in very different worlds now, as do current thirteen-year-olds). You just have to find out for yourself. You might as well be giving advice to me! There are certain wisdoms as a teenager that may well be forgotten as an older person, as insightful as anything else. You may know this from talking with your parents. Why can’t they grasp basic concepts? Didn’t they used to be thirteen too?
A few years ago I wrote a story about a very wise water buffalo living in a vacant lot, which local people would frequently consult when they had a problem. The water buffalo was unable to speak and too lazy to move, so would just point in a particular direction: nobody had any idea what this meant, only that they had the option of investigating further, by themselves, to see what the buffalo might be pointing at. I think the best advice is just like that: the most anyone can do is point vaguely. You can’t actually tell anyone much in advance and expect it to have the same weight of personal experience. That’s hot, so don’t touch it. Better yet, touch it so you know what I mean by ‘hot’. My advice about hotness is now moot. So maybe I should say nothing at all, let things go as they will, rather than risk screwing everything up as happens in a time-travel movie. Enjoy being thirteen!
What’s that? Well, yes, there is one problem. Being thirteen is not really a lot of fun. At least not for me, and I’ll bet not for a lot of other people. That’s not to say it’s not also a happy time, full of wonderful experiences, insights and opportunities. It just seems very difficult and awkward, and not even in hindsight. Thirteen-year-olds know the awkwardness acutely, each and every day. You can’t ignore it. It’s waiting for you first thing every morning.
Aside from the usual problems of a transitional phase, a messy crossing from childhood to adulthood, you probably don’t have a great deal of autonomy, cash-flow or career satisfaction, to say the least. Decisions are still often made for you and punishments dished out, and school may start feeling grimly institutional, as if you are doing time.
‘What are you in for?’
‘Being thirteen, but if I behave myself I might be eligible for parole in a few years.’
‘Just watch out for those thugs in the exercise yard, and don’t upset the warden.’
I exaggerate, but you know well what I mean.
Social relationships are tricky, if not sometimes mortifying, especially in relation to the opposite sex. Parents don’t have a clue about what’s going on. Adults are patronising. Previously respected authority figures are turning out to be very flawed human beings. The rules of society seem increasingly arbitrary, not to mention grossly unfair, not to mention insane (you know because you watch the news). You suspect that some classmates are actually undiagnosed psychopaths. There are mood swings too, as if you need that on top of everything else. You probably don’t know where you are going, what you are going to be, or who you are right now, or where you fit in the world at all. When people ask, you have a tendency to shrug, and you long to be left alone to ruminate on all this in a cave of your choice.
My older self can offer good news and bad news on this front. Which do you want first? Okay, the bad news is that such social and identity anxieties are unlikely to disappear. The world is still kind of messed up. Confidence and satisfaction levels will always be problematic if you are any kind of thinking or sensitive person (which I hope I am, it’s a good thing to be). You will often wonder, for the rest of your life, where you fit in, what you are supposed to be doing, who you are and so on. That uncertainty comes and goes all the time, there’s a fair amount of depression too. Learn to live with it!
So what’s the good news? All this is no bad thing. There’s nothing wrong with having some degree of insecurity, and it means that you probably are a thinking and sensitive person. And while it can feel like an affliction, you can also learn ways of managing it, improve things, and you might even find it useful. Anxiety is an important part of being alive and awake in the world. Of course, if it gets too much, you don’t have to tough it out alone in your bunker: there are always people who care about you and can help. It should never be allowed to get extreme, but on the other hand, I don’t think it should disappear entirely. I imagine that at eighty, if I make it that far, I’ll probably still be worrying over questions of identity, purpose and meaning from my hovering scooter. I kind of hope so. I think it goes hand in hand with creativity and curiosity. I can’t write or paint without some strange mix of confidence and insecurity; it’s as if one can’t exist without the other.
So, if the water buffalo could talk, it would probably just say this: it’s okay to be worried. It’s okay to be afraid, depressed, even miserable at times. And then it would point off into the distance: just keep going anyway. It might help to know that you are hardly alone, hardly abnormal. Everyone around you is dogged by anxiety and doubt, and most of us are going to great lengths to conceal it. Especially those who make themselves out to be super self-assured and confident – there’s all sorts of crazy things going on under the cool tip of the iceberg. Actually, be a little wary of those ones.
I wouldn’t worry about your future too much either – let your other selves, like me, do that for you. There will be plenty of pressure on you in a few years, if not now, to make career decisions. Yes, by all means pick a direction, fill in forms and keep an eye on grades, but do keep in mind that you are likely to have multiple careers in your lifetime. In hindsight, I think the main purpose of school is not academic achievement (as you are thinking now) or attaching numbers to a sheet. Scores are not very important in the scheme of life. Study hard, but don’t do it for a bunch of stupid percentages. School should be about finding your passion.
In choosing a career, or having life choose one for you, I doubt that anything is more important than passion. Forget about income, status or family respect – those things follow from doing good wo
rk and diligent study, and good work and diligent study follow from passion, which is a very personal, non-exchangeable resource. Yours is the only kind there is. Imagine that in the future your job is actually a fun, fulfilling hobby for which you get paid. This is certainly possible: I’m doing it right now. Whatever you are enjoying the most at thirteen, you will likely still enjoy at twenty, forty, eighty. The passion will grow, wane, develop, even radically change course, but at its core, the thirteen-year-old self is an excellent time to know what inspires and motivates you the most, prior to the various complications and compromises of adulthood. In fact, when things get really tough and confusing as hell, you are going to need motivation, and it won’t come so much from strategy or knowledge: it will come from passion. Things you find inspiring and fun. I don’t think they talk about fun enough in relation to careers, but it’s a pretty vital component.
As a forty-one-year-old, I don’t feel that my basic interests have changed much at all since I was thirteen, and I’m glad I pursued painting and drawing, in spite of so many people telling me that being an artist did not constitute stable employment.
Interestingly, the kind of job I do now did not exist on the charts presented by my career counsellor in high school: a terrific guy, but like the rest of us unable to know everything, much less the future. In any case, he was better off remaining vague, because the path by which I came to be, say, directing a short animated film, writing a picture book, painting a mural or speaking at a conference in Mexico is so crazily convoluted, I could not have actually studied for it directly. And I didn’t: nothing I do now is the consequence of actual qualification, I’ve just learned along the way, moving from project to project, with lots of flat spots in between. I may well be doing something quite different in another ten years, and I’m open to that. The most important thing I learned at school – which you are learning now – is how to adapt, learning how to learn. The algebra you will forget, but the experience of wrangling formulae, even the insufferably boring stuff, is lodging an important pattern somewhere in your subconscious, building some kind of wiring and stamina.
Letter to My Teenage Self Page 10
