And I did not know it while I was living them.
In 2013, I was ten years old and the world was the size of my bedroom. Definitely not in a sad way but in the best possible way. The ceiling was familiar, the blanket was warm and somewhere outside my window, life was happening at a pace I was not yet expected to keep up with. I did not know that yet. I just knew that I was ten, and that it was enough.
Those years between ten and sixteen sit in a part of my memory that feels different from the rest, like a photograph that developed slightly out of focus but you keep it anyway because the feeling in it is exactly right. Nothing was figured out, everything was being tried for the first time, and there was this particular kind of joy that came with that, the joy of not yet knowing who you were going to be, which meant you could be absolutely anything on any given afternoon.
I was thirteen and had Shawn Mendes lyrics memorised before the week was out. I sang Justin Bieber, Taylor Swift and One Direction into a hairbrush with full conviction that I understood things I absolutely did not understand yet. The music made me feel like I was practising being a person who felt things deeply. Turns out, I was.
But what I remember most from those years is movement. The specific feeling of a body that was still learning what it could do. Badminton courts and the satisfying crack of a clean smash. The underwater silence of a swimming pool. Chess, completely still, teaching me that patience is not passive, but instead one of the most active things you can practice. And the track, the starting line, that specific silence before the signal, with your whole body coiled and ready. I was not the fastest. I was never the fastest. But there is something about running that strips everything back to just you and the ground and how much you want it. I wanted it. I always wanted it more than I could actually deliver, which is maybe the most honest thing I can say about who I was at fourteen.
“We were becoming shaped by it all without knowing we were being shaped.”
Some nights, I was reading Wattpad until 1 am with the brightness turned all the way down. Real books too, the kind you carry around for days, the kind that rearrange something inside you. I was the kid who stayed up past my bedtime to finish a chapter, and I do not regret a single minute of it.
Between 2013 and 2019 the world was changing faster than any of us realised. We were growing up inside it, absorbing everything, becoming shaped by it without knowing we were being shaped. The late nights, the pool, the court, the track, the chessboard and the friendships that felt like forever. All of it quietly building the person we would eventually become.
I am twenty two now and I want to tell you something true. You will not get those years back. Not the Wednesday afternoons on the court, not the underwater silence, not the starting line and definitely not the feeling of a book that split your world open a little. You will not get back the version of you who tried things without needing a reason, who cared loudly and who had not yet learned to shrink herself down to fit into rooms.
She is gone and she deserved so much more credit than you gave her.
So if something in this made you stop, good. Sit there for a moment. Think about who you were at twelve, at fourteen and at sixteen, still unfinished and radiant and completely unaware of both. Think about everything she carried so you would not have to. Think about how far she brought you on nothing but instinct and love and sheer stubbornness.
She knew something. She was onto something real. And she carried you all the way here, to this exact moment, reading this, the least you can do is finally say thank you.
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