PEONY MAGAZINE Sept. 2017 | Page 19

Conversations With High School-Aged Me

I have a lot of problems with this picture. It's of me, roughly seven years ago now. I don't know if anyone else can tell, but when I look into this girl’s face, all I see are sad eyes. I was dealing with a lot of things at the time. I was miserable.

It was also a time of incredible opportunity. I was going to go to college in a few months. The world was at my feet. I would be graduating high school with a 3.7 GPA and my head was full of dreams and aspirations of what my future would be like. I would not have imagined my life being the way it is now.

By Victoria Baker Lisowski

This is me now. Or, a few months ago, rather. I'm very different, and it's not just the hair or the boy. I have two children. I've graduated college with a degree in English and a minor in Communications. I got married. I have a house. My fiction still hasn’t been published but I have hopes.

And I am also, occasionally, miserable.

But not the same kind of miserable I was back then.

If I could sit down with my younger self and look her in the eyes, what would I say? What would I do to try to prepare her for the future? Would I be nice to her? I don't always appreciate the person I was back then. Sometimes I'm angry with her. Sometimes I just wish she'd made different choices.

"If I could sit down with my younger self and look her in the eyes, what would I say?"

pEONY mAGAZINE 19