One of the frustrations of life is you gain perspective as you mature which may have come really in handy back when you were young. So many mistakes then could have been avoided if you had then the perspective you have now.

Movies like Back to the Future and The Kid have fun with this premise allowing a character to return to their younger selves with their current perspective or vice versa. In Back to the Future, Marty McFly changes the whole course of his family history. In Disney’s The Kid, Russ Duritz, played by Bruce Willis, is confronted by an 8 year old version of himself who wants to know where their dog is since he assumed he would have one as an adult.

What would you ask your older self? What would your child self have wanted you to remember? Would your younger self recognize who you have become?

Each year as I grew up, my mother would have me fill out a school years book of memories. One of the checklists asked you what you wanted to be when you grew up. For girls, the choices were pretty stereotyped: mother, teacher, nurse, stewardess…. But there was an Other box with a blank. One year, I checked that and filled in ‘Pet Owner’. My little self hadn’t know a day without pets to love and couldn’t imagine my older self wouldn’t have pets, too.

My cats then

My cats now

And, each year, I checked, among other things, ‘Mother’. Now, I’m lucky to be a mother and a nana to this lot.

So in some ways, I have been true to little Shari. But I wonder what else she might have wondered about me. What questions would I have had?

In Pride Month, I’m reminded of the videos of people telling younger people, ‘It Gets Better’, that the loneliness and questioning they may feel now won’t define them later. That impulse to tell their younger selves to hold on has been a powerful statement for youth coming to age later. Www.itgetsbetter.org has become the world’s largest story telling effort to help LGBTQIA youth.

The perspective we’ve gained now, lessons we’ve learned, can be lifeblood to others going through struggles like what we have overcome. One of the gifts of age is to be able to use our experiences to help others. Indeed, many therapy models embrace the idea of nurturing your own younger self now in ways you might not have received when you were young, to listen to your own inner young self, and treat yourself now with the kindness you wish you had had then.

It’s an interesting exercise to sit and imagine what the conversation between your current self and your child self would look like? What questions does your younger self have? What comfort and reassurance can your older self provide?

Consider this video, years in the making, where 6th grade children recorded the questions and their older 12th grade selves recorded the answers.