Dear Phantom: a Letter to My Younger Self

Dear Phantom of the Library,

Yes, I can see why you chose that name for yourself.  Ever since the Music teacher introduced the class to Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s version of Phantom, you identified with the Phantom – just as, when you read Frankenstein, you identified with the Monster.  Not that you’re a violent criminal whom people fear, of course, and you know you’re not particularly ugly.  But as someone who regularly gets taunted for being a weirdo and a loner, you understand how monsters feel.  In your case, instead of dropping chandeliers on people, you just haunt the school library, hidden behind a book or a magazine.

Talking of magazines – you buy The Big Issue sometimes, on your way home from school, don’t you?  Even when it prints sour articles with titles like ‘The A-Z of hating Christmas’ (‘S is for Students.  Any time of year is a good time to hate students’), you accept this as no more than you deserve.

I can’t remember whether The Big Issue had started its ‘Letter to my younger self’ column yet, in 1994.  In theory, this is supposed to be where a guest interviewee (usually a celebrity) writes a letter telling their teenage self all the things they wish they had known then.  So, as you’ve probably guessed (or maybe not – we could be quite obtuse about obvious plot twists), I am your older self.  As I’m nearly 42, I might be The Answer to some of your worries – or at least, I might have a better idea what some of the questions are.

In our case, the things we didn’t understand about the world – mostly things everyone else had worked out intuitively before they could even talk – won’t fit in on a page of a magazine.  Some of the ones I’ve worked out between age 13 and age 42 would be enough to fill a book.

The snag is, of course, that I don’t have a way of getting the book to you.  Technology by the 2020s has made some wonderful advances, but time travel still only goes forwards, and only at a pace of sixty minutes per hour.  So I’ll just have to ask you to wait about three decades until you’re me and you’ve written the book, and you can read it then.  I hope it helps you.

I also hope it might help someone else, but I don’t know whether it’s too niche.  I’m sure there are other depressed autistic teenagers out there, but they have worries of their own which don’t necessarily coincide with ours.  Even if they are depressed autistic evangelical Christian teenage girls who suffer from a speech impediment, have two younger siblings, live in England, have a crush on Oscar Wilde, identify with Rimmer in Red Dwarf as well as with Frankenstein’s Monster, have retro taste in music, and consider themselves to be asexual or at least late developers, it’s still not guaranteed.

However, probably people who come into some of these categories will find some of it helpful.  So might parents, teachers and youth workers trying to understand someone who is a bit like us, or even other teenagers wondering why their classmate is so weird.

Obviously, since you aren’t actually reading this in the 1990s, you can’t send me letters asking for help.  But I can remember a lot of the things we worried about, so I’ll write them myself, if that’s okay.  (It’s no weirder than Cecily in The Importance of Being Earnest writing herself love letters from her fantasy boyfriend, right?)

One small, not very important worry to start with.  You want to be a writer, and you’re worried that if you get published and build up a literary reputation under your maiden name and then get married, you’ll have to start all over again as an unknown writer under your new name, because using your maiden name would now be a lie if that isn’t your name any more.

Well, it’s not a problem.  This isn’t just because you might not become a famous writer very early in life, or because you might not get married for a long time, if at all.  (This book isn’t going to be a forecast of your life.  Let’s say that if you really were reading these letters as a young teenager, your life after reading them might follow a different path from mine, so I don’t actually know your future.)

The reason you don’t need to worry about names is that (a) lots of women don’t change their names when they get married, and (b) you are allowed to write under any name you like.  You already know both these facts, if you stop to think about it for a moment.  Think how many authors you have already read who wrote under pen-names, from Charles Dodgson to Mary Ann Evans to Samuel Clemens.

By the time you grow up, you probably won’t want to be famous under your real name.  When you’re a teenager, even if you’re so shy that you don’t know how to start a conversation with your classmates, the idea of being interviewed for newspapers, or playing yourself in a film of your life, can seem quite exciting.  But would you really want to be recognised by fans everywhere you go?  Would you want to be stalked by journalists who keep trying to take photographs of you taking a shower after swimming?

No, I haven’t had experiences like these, thankfully.  I’m not a celebrity, nor a famous writer.  But what writing I have done has mostly been posted on something called the Internet, which is a network of computers all over the world.  In 1994, when you’re thirteen, the Internet is still getting started, but by 1999, you’ll be using it to do all kinds of things, from writing letters to your parents that reach them instantly to playing with computerised translation programs to find out just how bad they are.  (Okay, I said this wouldn’t be a forecast of your life, but – if you’re anything like me, you’ll probably be doing this.)

Among the things you could be doing on the Internet by the late 1990s (though I didn’t realise this until later) is posting fanfiction.  You remember that story you wrote, the sequel to Beauty and the Beast in which the Beast (now a human king, and middle-aged by now) goes in search of his lost son (now turned into a Beast), riding on a dragon and accompanied by a reformed vampire who is based on the Phantom of the Opera, and a teenage girl who is based on you? 

Well, in a few years, it will be possible to put stories like this on the Internet, and people all over the world will be able to read them.  You don’t get paid for writing these stories, but the authors who wrote the stories yours are based on won’t sue you, because you’re only doing it for fun and not for money.  People who read your stories can send you comments saying whether they like your story or not, and you can send comments back.  You might become friends with someone who lives on a different continent and whom you have never seen.

However, not everyone you meet on the Internet is trustworthy, and it can be risky giving strangers your real name and address.  To be on the safe side, most people writing fanfiction write under a pseudonym.  I didn’t feel like the Phantom of the Library any more by the time I joined a fanfiction site, so instead I decided to name myself after a village in Somerset.  I think it’s quite a distinguished name.  At any rate, if I use it in these letters, it should help to distinguish 42-year-old me from teenage me.

Best wishes,

Temple Cloud