Stephen Fry Writes Back - What Would You Say to Your 16 Year Old Self?

In his 1997 autobiography, Stephen Fry published a letter he had written to his future self as an unhappy 16 year-old. This week, in the 25th birthday edition of Gay Times, he finally replies to his teenage self. An excerpt from it is also published in The Guardian.

I suspect few of us were self-centred enough to pen a letter to our adult selves. Having said that, if we could now send an epistle to our teenage self, what would we say?

Fry rather focusses on his studies and his homosexuality. Many comments have been deleted at The Guardian webpage - no doubt nuggets of gay abuse - even though Fry's monologue proclaims that his source of misery and tragedy was not so much sexuality as love. Like any precocious talent, he didn't just ignore his problems in the vain hope they might dissolve away, but rather tried to analyse them with his intellectual scalpel. Discovering a galaxy of dead friends through their writing probably compounded the isolation - at least until university.

So, are all 16 year-olds doomed to a state of turbid confusion as they learn to swim through their hormonal cross-currents? Were we all desperately seeking love and approval, or just connections to fellow spirits?

I really don't recall such a desire for love - death seemed to be a far more effective stalker. Like Fry, my 16 year-old self was largely immersed in books and wandering London's cathedrals of knowledge. The Science Museum and the British Museum are both testaments to a human search for the sublime; to something above and beyond this mundane life. But the search for the ephemeral is also liable to produce a very concrete case of depression.

Doc: Why are you depressed, Alvy?
Mother: Tell doctor [?] It's something he read.
Doc: Something you read, heh?
Alvy: The universe is expanding.
Doc: The universe is expanding?
Alvy: Well, the universe is everything, and if it's expanding, someday it will break apart and that would be the end of everything!
Mother(shouting): What is that your business? (to doctor) He stopped doing his homework.
Alvy: What's the point?
Mother: What has the universe got to do with it? You're here in Brooklyn! Brooklyn is not expanding!

(from Annie Hall, directed by Woody Allen)

Although I didn't look like the geeky Alvy, that scene always makes me smile. London was also not expanding, but rather shrinking as I took up the freedom to roam. But what had also shrunk was my ability to delve deeper into my psyche. "What's the point?" is the kind of irritating thing teenagers love to say, but is also a deeply serious question. It is an intellectual sledgehammer against all the social protocols that seem to keep people going. But from childhood to teenage-hood, those things gained eclipsed those things that were lost.

One of the grave errors adults make is to assume that the inner life of a child is just a mass of confusion waiting for the orderly rules of adulthood to tidy up that mental bedroom. From my experience, this is far from true and the insights gained were only lacking in the ability to express them eloquently, as well as a certain amount of self-protection as these were not things that seemed to be discussed. However, the hormonal changes during pubescence seem to conspire to draw a curtain across those natural abilities and to push us into society - as society then pushes back.

If there is a message to my 16 year-old self, it is that this too will pass, that what you are looking for you had already found... and lost. That once the firework display ends you'll be able to see the stars again.