Dear Savannah,
This is the story of how you will learn to love people deeply, but it's not so much a happy one.
You are little when this story starts. An impressionable age. Life will be fun and fresh and filled to the brim with adventure. These are the days that your heart is most soft. These are the days that will callous your heart.
It will start out in innocent, teasing comments. They will say that you're fat. (They are lying, but more on that later.)
At first, you won't care. Their snide comments are just words. Your mother will say that they are simply "insecure", but you won't understand her yet. Instead, you'll tough it up and continue with your friendships.
One day, they won't invite you over to their party. It will hurt because they made a point of specifically not inviting you. This will confuse you before it hurts you.
They will laugh at you. They will tell you that they don't want to hang out with you because your parents are so strict. You will be the odd one out.
They will make fun of you for being homeschooled. They will say you don't "understand" what public school is like. They will say that you're fat and ugly, and when you put makeup on, they will call you a "cake face" and a "slut".
They will make up stories about you. In those stories, you will always be the slut. You will always be the tattle-tale. You will always be the one without self-control around food. You will always be the undesirable.
You will come home crying every Wednesday night and Sunday morning. You will develop eating disorders. Your blue eyes will start to look like "dirty sea water". Your hips will become "love handles" and your stomach will be the object of much poking and prodding. You will not respect yourself. You will begin to hate yourself.
This is why you will learn to love so deeply.
After many years, you will be able to understand your mother's words. They are insecure. This is why they are so unbearably cruel to you. You are untainted. Happy without much reason. They cannot understand you. People destroy what they cannot understand.
Remember this always.
You will come to a point in your life where you have two choices - two paths.
On the one hand, you can continue this cycle of pain. Stay bitter. Harden your heart. Treat others with that same sharpness that you were beaten down with. Be cruel. Destroy what you can no longer understand.
Or you can be the antidote of cruelty. Live your life solely for the purpose to furthering your Savior's love. Be kind. Gentle. Empathize with the down-trodden. Lift up the sorrowful. Laugh at jokes that aren't funny, just to be encouraging. Mend the wounds of others with prayer and love. Be merciful to the ones who hurt you.
You, courageous little rebel, will choose the latter. You won't be perfect. You will gossip and regret it. You will hurt people on accident and then in anger. You will become bitter from new wounds. But you will apologize and you will forgive.
Savannah, this is where you will learn to love deeply.
You will look past snide comments. You will see straight into hurting hearts. You will see them for what they are. You will embrace the insecure and tell them how beautiful and talented and wonderful and incredible they are.
You will understand that love is loving unconditionally, not liking when convenient. You will read books of characters who are far from perfect, and you will fall in love with them. You will fall in love with broken people, and kind people, and skewed people, and people from history, and people from fiction, and everyone in between. You will protect the ones you love.
This pain is necessary. You are valuable, even when hard-heart friends cannot understand you.
Love,
Yourself
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