Letter To My Younger Self

Dear Younger Rebeca. This is you. Rebeca. But at almost 21 years old. I'm still 20.

You have done quite a few of these. Letters to yourself. All of them have been school assignments, and be honest. You never took any of them seriously.

But this is me...writing a letter to you...aka me... No grade in the balance. Just a one on one talk for you and me.

Here we go...

Dear younger self...

Your life right now is going...GREAT. Funny because I'm sure at your age, I didn't think I would even make it to eighteen.

After everything you will be going through/ and have already gone through... your life will get better.

But it will suck a little bit at first. Don't worry though, this is where I come in and say, you will get through it. Hell, I'm living proof of that.

Here's how it's going to go...

You will grow up seeing your parents fight...all the time. It will ruin your perception on love. YOU will fight with your sisters ALL the time, you all have the scars to prove it. It will ruin your relationship with them until you're an adult, but don't worry, your relationship will get way better.

Both of those things will pass, eventually, but it will affect you for the rest of your life, sadly.

Your anxiety starts around four years old, it's minor. Mom and Dad don't think much of it, no one does. But surprise, your anxiety right now is here to stay.

You feel as if you don't belong, even at such a young age, even in your family. But don't worry, one day there will be a time where people accept you BECAUSE you don't fit in.

Your anxiety is tied to the fights in the house, and you start to stay away from people. Including your family. That's when the depression starts.

School is the only time you feel...happy. But even then, with the anxiety, it's hard for you to open up to people, especially strangers. Making friends is hard, so you make acquaintances. Making someone your friend was hard, and it will devastate you when your friendship ends.

You make your first real friend in third grade, the nicest person in class, and you're still friends to this day, even if you don't speak that much anymore.

I'm going to give you some advice that I wish I had back then.

Don't be jealous of your friends. They are all going through their own battles, you don't need to put them up on a pedestal. That is how you end up hurt.

Don't be afraid to feel. Don't be afraid to cry. Don't be afraid to express your feelings and how you're feeling at certain moments.

Who is it doing good if you're keeping everything inside?

You'll have multiple break downs before you're even a teenager... But these breakdowns are secret to everyone else but your family.

It'll all make sense one day...

Middle school was the hard years. Looks meant everything. You put too much powder on your face in sixth grade...You put too much eyeliner in seventh grade. I know you'll think it looks good then, but take this from me, it'll only make your skin worse. Oh. And in eighth grade...DONT GET BANGS.

Thirteen was an extremely hard year.

You will meet who you think will be your best friend forever. But truth is, she will teach you the worst habit of your life. She'll encourage you to hurt yourself, sometimes during class just to get the adrenaline. She'll make it a competition, and you'll soon learn that it's not okay.

You'll know what it is...and I know it will feel good, and almost painless, and you will feel the relief. Just know that it's temporary, and your body doesn't deserve to be covered in scars like that.

This bad habit will go on until the summer after graduating. You graduated three years ago, so you've been three years clean.

Now we're in high school.

A new school puts a strain on friendships, and you grow apart from people you thought you'd know forever. It will break you, for a moment. Then you will meet knew friends, become even closer with people who you didn't let yourself become close with in middle school.

You will go through high school in pain, not just emotionally, but internally. Don't worry, the doctors will EVENTUALLY figure out what it is. You'll end up with a scar on your stomach, and although it looks horrible at first, it will grow on you.

And as for the emotional pain, you'll try and get some help. But after forty minutes of talking, you'll decide that you're just not ready to come to terms with what could be wrong with you. But you'll also learn that it's not your fault.

You will lose friends, people in your class, and it's a specific persons death that forces you to go into out patient treatment for your emotional problems. You will meet people in treatment, including a specific person that you will never see again and miss everyday, she will be your best friend in there, and these people will change your life for the better.

You will miss a month of school, three weeks, and a week of spring break, but you will learn what you have.

And it will all make sense.

When you come back to school, it's like the sun is shining directly at you. And girl, you're getting a tan. The cloud over your head is no longer there.

Though sometimes you feel hurt, and sometimes you will feel depressed, you no longer think of the Last Resort. Because, everything you've been repressing, it's coming out. Including happiness. And all of a sudden, you'll feel happiness like you've never felt it before.

But now you're also feeling sadness, and anger, and so many feelings you didn't know you COULD have. And for once, it's a good thing. Because now you know how to deal with it.

Now you're more outspoken in school and especially at home. Your relationship with your parents will improve significantly, and your younger siblings as well.

Although it's still hard, you manage. At least now you are acknowledging it, it's there, and you're dealing with it.

Dealing with it means that you've pushed the toxic people out of your life. That includes one family member. One that held a lot of resentment over you.

You cut her out of your life. For a year. Then she grew up, she was becoming a mother, and you haven't had a fight since. It makes me want to cry just thinking of all the fighting you used to do, and now you go over to her house all the time, and watch her kids, who you love so much.

You will go to community college for a year...and it will not work out. You leave school to work, and write.

Now you have five books out. The most recent one is doing exceptionally well, and you're very happy about it. This could be the book that gets you noticed.

You are an assistant manager at a pizzeria, and you are thriving there. Although, what you want is to be a writer. And I am working really hard to make that happen.

Things will try to break you, people will try to hurt you, and you will want to wish you were never alive. But you will heal, get strong, and realize that life is precious.

I am twenty years old right now. Four months shy of being 21.

Everything is really great right now, and these are the words I live by:

Everything will be okay in the end, if it's not okay, it's not the end.

I know I could have used those words when I was you, younger Rebeca. Because there were so many times I wished that it was the end, and now I'm so glad that I didn't choose to make it the end.

I love you. Love yourself. I know it's hard, but I know you can do it.

Signed,


            REBECA XX

Loving yourself is the hardest thing you can do...

Having dealt with depression most of my life, I never realized what it was like to love myself until a few years ago.

I knew how to hate myself, that I had no problem with.

There was this year, between the hospital and then therapy, that something clicked in my mind. I was seventeen, and really sick of just being sad.

I knew there wasn't a way I could just turn off my depression, it would always be there, but maybe I could divert it.

Here are some things I learned in therapy, and some stuff I learned after therapy.

1. Learn what you like about yourself: One thing I could remember that I liked about myself back then was how much I liked writing. I wrote a few pieces every now and then, but I was proud of them because I had written them.

2. Learning to give myself a break: There's no harsher critic than yourself. In school, I felt as if I had to be the best at everything. When I wasn't, that's when all the dark thoughts and feelings came creeping in, so I had to learn to tell myself...It's okay.

3. Learn who the enemy is: Depression is the enemy. It is this black dog trying to keep you down, trying to make you feel as if you're the only who feels that way.

4. Love: It could be loving to write, or falling in love with a person, or fall in love with storms. Whatever you can find, love it, and hold on to it. I really love writing, and hate leaving stories unfinished. I fall in love with my characters and with the thought that only I could finish their stories. That keeps me going most days.

5. Learn your goals: If you have goals...you have a future. My goal is to be a published author, and I think about that everyday. I write to work towards that goal.

6. Love yourself: There are some things only you can do. Think about this world without you, think about all that people that love you, and can't live without you. I can't really tell you how to love yourself. One thing that worked for me, was looking at myself in the mirror in the bathroom and saying it out loud. Say out loud things you love about yourself, and eventually you'll start to believe them.

I'm writing this during a thunderstorm, so I'm going to spend my day indoors writing my new story, and drinking tea, oh and listening to the Grease Live and Legally Blonde The Musical soundtrack, it's amazing!

Hope you guys have a great February, filled with love and happiness!

Rebeca xx

Broken Perfectly...

"When we're broken we like to believe that if maybe someone just hugs us tight enough we'd be put back together." -Rebeca Ruiz, Broken Perfectly (out soon).

As humans, we are not invincible. We are not immortal, we are just mortal. It doesn't take much to break us, and I just don't mean physically.

I am almost done writing Broken Perfectly (it finally has a title) and it has made me learn so much about myself.

Often people ask me why I have such dark writing, and if I need some mental help. Because what kind of person writes about heartbreak, or car accidents with near death experiences, or suicide, or rape victims, or death?

I write about these people because these people exist. Not just in my head but in the real world.

I know that there are people in the world going through heartbreak, dealing with a loss of a loved one, post traumatic stress disorders, depression, suicide attempts, or just surviving whatever they are going through. They are all out there.

I do my best to do my research, make sure I get everything right, making sure I get their stories right.

I have known people to suffer through depression and convince themselves that they are okay. I have known people who isolate themselves for fear of being hurt, and push people who love them away.

I have known someone to take their life because they were just so sad on the inside, I have almost been that person.

My characters thoughts sometimes come from me and what I was feeling when I was eleven until I was sixteen.

If there's something I want my readers to take from my writing is that everyone deserves a happy ending. It will come in it's own time, you just have to keep going.

It doesn't matter if you're a 'broken person' because broken people eventually find the person who will keep them together, that will help those wounds heal. Maybe it will be a boyfriend/girlfriend, maybe it will be your best friend, maybe it will be a stranger that you meet for one night.

There's no such thing as too broken in my book. You are who you are for a reason, and therefore broken perfectly.

Broken Perfectly will be out soon, it's a continuation of Broken Pleasure, Ryder and Scarlett's story. Here is a little summary, some spoilers!:

Ryder and Scarlett are both engaged. Not to each other. To other people that they have decided to commit to.

Willow's wedding is bringing up old feelings and issues that were never dealt with. Keep in mind, Scarlett is only in town for a few days, then she's running back to her home back South.

Will they finally have their happily ever after, or will more heartbreak and fear keep them apart?

xxRebeca