To my younger self:

Breathe in their bitter pain

Take it for a while

Feel it and taste it on the bitter back of your bumpy tongue

Get to know it like you know your own, you little owl

Breathe it like eucalyptus

Then once you know it like Einstein knew physics, feels the same because you can’t compare headaches

You have a migraine, I have major sinus crap going on

Just because my head doesn’t hurt as much as much as your head, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt.

If you can get inside someone’s pain, like a hot dog on a bun, dripping with mustard and sauerkraut,

and understand it as your own, you can’t hate them without hating yourself.

We really are one being, One Being. A big old slinky marching around the Universe.

Seek it, every opportunity to grow, a little at a time, like a lobster from its shell, and feel what it feels like to be uncomfortable for a while.

Walk around with your jeans too tight on your big fat butt, (wolf whistle!) because you ate too much ice cream

If a lobster can do it, baby doll, so can you.

Then you get to become made real like the Velveteen Rabbit with its fuzz in patches, loved to so many pieces it had no choice but to change and hop with love and joy, as in the arms of his beloved boy.