Dear Bubba

I cannot (I don't know whether this is a good thing to admit) stop listening to "Little Me" by Little Mix. I think it's brilliant! And yet, for all the market music manipulation and the potential cheesy-ness that the lyrics may suggest; it has alot of meaning for me.

Know matter what you think you might want to tell yourself, what morals you want to uphold and what you want to have in the finer details of your life, it is inevitable that something won't quite go to plan.

As a little bubba, she didn't know that she was going to grow into me. And the me of the present doesn't know what the future me has in store. What kind of values I might change. Where I want to be working. Nothing is concrete which makes life all the more interesting.

But what you can do with your life choices is look back.

This is me as a little bubba, less than, or around, a year old in 1995 ...

Things change so drastically that it's sometimes hard to keep on top. So I want to offer some (probably pointless) advice to my little self. You can't change the past, and by publishing this post, I'm not hoping to do so but to just get thinking. What would I do if I could re-write the years of my life?

These thoughts on the past are the medicine of the future. The footsteps I have taken will now point the way that I am headed :D  

So here goes; 

Dear Bubba, 

One of the first things I'd let you know is that you should never have to be anyone other than yourself. 

Individuality has always been something I've struggled with. I didn't, when I was younger, quite know how to deal with the concept of being different. It took me a long time to bring the confidence I have at home into the outside world. To stop walking as though the world was watching. Talking as though everyone was listening. And looking how I thought everyone wanted me to look. One of the biggest examples that show that I've finally come further than my inward teenage self was a conversation that only happened this Christmas between me and my brother.

  Undoubtedly, University has given me quite a bit of confidence and gave me the opportunity to start with a clean plate and to present my true self without any inhibitions. When I went back to visit my A-level college I felt alien in the fact that so many people remarked on how much I had changed. 

  I rarely let myself fully flow at school. School for me was somewhere that gave me an education and shoved me out into the world of work. I held onto my school years, almost with my life, and was quiet, as though I was trying to get on Fate's good side and plea with it to let me stay young forever. In truth, I was petrified of leaving home. 

  So as I took my reinvigorated self down the all-too-familiar corridors of classrooms where the teachers within no longer belonged to me, I struck up at least one remark from everyone who I spoke to regarding how much I'd changed. I felt I had. I was a new woman! 

  But it wasn't until I got home one day when my brothers came in from school that I realised it was as I had always imagined. My brothers told me that the teachers I had seen that morning had informed them of my presence within the school and I distinctly remember what one of them said;

"(So and so) said that you've changed so much but you haven't really. You were always like this at home."

That, as much as anything, affirmed the kind of person that I had now allowed myself to be and who I should have let shine every single day of my life. 

*

Dear Bubba, 

Don't try and copy the dress sense of everyone else. 

The aim of many of my secondary school days become focused on finding a way to infiltrate into the semantics of the word 'cool'. But I couldn't. I couldn't change the fact that I preferred being in the library; reading than sitting out in the freezing cold on a bench. Or that a high hoicked skirt and blazer wasn't sufficient to cover me from the chill. Nor that I had to eat more than just a plain pot of pasta ALL DAY because I'd pass out with hunger otherwise. 

  But though I couldn't change those fundamental aspects of eating, school wear and past-times, I still was given opportunity to be a talking point when it came to mufti days. What I didn;t know was that it was all for the wrong reasons. I could tell endless tales of my fashion faux-pas'. From wearing tiny hot-pants in the spring, getting a wedgy in class and being cautioned by the matron to co-ordinating a hot pink roll-neck jumper with a matching woolen cardigan and jewels on my jeans in a similar pink hue. No wonder I had my mum to dress me day in, day out until I was in year 8. To be honest, for a few years afterwards, she probably shouldn't have stopped!

  I have a big passion for hair despite the fact that I hated mine until I was 13 and I especially LOVE Afros!!! Wild; they're such a massive expression of a personality. And tamed under plaits they're so effortless. I once, in year 7, took it upon myself to copy this; tying my hair into 5 uneven plaits that hung over my face and awkwardly around my ears. I thought I was the bees knees!

*

Dear Bubba,

Don't eat garlic and mayonnaise sandwiches after school and think you can get away with it!

I had, and still have, gigantic cravings for garlic. So much so that after school I would come in and fold a piece of white bread in half, smother it with mayo and dash it with dried, chopped garlic. Then I would cut it into 4's and eat it like there was no tomorrow. My mum would sometimes ask whether I'd been eating garlic, a question that required me to hastily deny the knowledge that garlic even existed before slinking off to my room to mask the smell with chocolates and biscuits. 

*

Dear Bubba, 

You don't have to be afraid. 

Lack of confidence is something that has effected me my ENTIRE life. Naturally I'm not a very confident person and it takes something inside me to stir before I can be so. For me, this year gaining confidence has been about making a new start. When you can get rid of all the previous assumptions people have about you and focus on creating new memories it makes finding your voice so much easier. 

*

Dear Bubba, 

You don't have to try to break into singing or acting (when you can do neither) just because you don't think you have a calling in life. Something will crop up. 

There have been countless occasions in my life when I wasted afternoons looking at acting placements or coached myself in the art of scales. I always felt quite useless at anything when I was a child. But with determination I've got myself through my weaknesses to find my strengths and I've become a much better person for it. 

*

Dear Bubba, 

Honesty is the best policy but ...

We've all been there; caught between 2 friends, neither of whom we want to hurt but both of whom we feel that we need to support. I was often found lying to protect people and, later on, being too honest to be faithful to the Truth - neither of which worked. If I had anything I had to say to little me it would be, tell the truth but sometimes the whole truth isn't necessary. Keep those who mean anything and everything close to you and don't hurt those who aren't. 

*****

I don't think one blog post was really big enough for me to record everything I would want to tell myself. But this is just a start. Bubba - take note.