Notes to My Past Self 1 & 2: True Love Doesn’t Wait & Halloween Poop

NTPS #1: True Love Doesn’t Wait

To 6th grade Angela whose True Love Waits necklace breaks. Again.

I don’t know what to tell you, maybe these things are cheaply made. Maybe it is not good to wear jewelry while learning how to do a layup from your brother. Maybe your perspiration is like acid. There are many possibilities, but I think it is the Universe giving you a clear sign there is no way, ever, you are going to be a virgin until marriage. So just let go of that idea.

You do, however, graduate high school a virgin. But not because of your necklace, or any promise to your abstinence-obsessed God, but because you are awkward and really bad at dating. And don’t realize that you could possibly get any guy in school if you openly offered up your private parts. I am glad you did not understand this. 

NTPS #2: Halloween Poop Emergency

To 7th-grade Angela, dressed as a cat, who ate too many sixlets at the beginning of Jenny’s Halloween party.

It’s embarrassing, I know. It’s embarrassing to be at your first Halloween party EVER, trick-or-treating with new friends from your new school, and have your stomach go into full blown I-need-a-bathroom-right-now rebellion. It is embarrassing to beg a fancy woman if you could PLEASE use her fancy bathroom, and for her to say “No,” because you are a strange kid and it is not customary to let desperate teens you don’t know into one’s house. It is embarrassing to scuttle back to your friend’s house, hoping you can find it, to sneak quietly in and to the bathroom where you feel like you are going to poop yourself to death, while praying to dear god almighty that you are done by the time the other kids return. 

But you will not be done. You will hear them coming in, their laughter, the sound of candy poured onto a table, and wish you had chosen a more private bathroom and not the official bathroom for the party. You will wish you could just disappear altogether. And I am not here to comfort you and say it turns out great, because it doesn’t. The night is harrowing and you just want to go home and not see anyone ever again.

But I will tell you that it stops mattering really fast. Days go by, no one is talking about your poop emergency, and life continues. You get to move on and be stressed about other things, like failing pre-algebra and how Nicky likes Brad even though you said you like Brad first. This is also not going to be your worst toilet emergency, it will be greatly eclipsed when you get to college, and that one will be eclipsed when you have to poop in a van. But you will get over both of those, too.