Love Letters from My Younger Self: The Girl in the Window
Rediscovering early 2000s blog writing through the lens of undiagnosed ADHD, romantic conditioning, and reclaiming the love we’re taught to earn.
Author's Note
This entry is part of an ongoing series exploring how my undiagnosed ADHD shaped the way I wrote, thought, and experienced the world in my early twenties. Each piece begins with an excerpt from my original 2000s blog, followed by reflection from my present-day self, now 38 and newly able to name what was once just a feeling.
The Girl in the Window:
It is late on a Sunday night, the kind of night that makes the week ahead feel a little too close. Most people are already asleep, wrapped in the kind of dreamless rest I’ve always imagined other women inherit effortlessly. Others drift through the immensity of the night, some for work, others because their minds refuse to settle.
Suddenly, a light flickers on in the window across from mine. A sharp beam slices through the dark, illuminating the body of a young woman, maybe 21. Too young for this world, yet too old to believe in the childish myths that still keep her eyes shut to what’s coming. She lies still, almost like a monument, untouchable, unknowable.
And I feel I am not alone.
There is life moving through unseen spaces, even in those that were once considered corridors to the future. I mean the internet, that wild terrain we mistook for connection. A geography designed to keep us in motion, suspended between tabs and selves. Mine, hers, yours. The sick, the quiet, the overly awake.
I want to believe that even the rats beneath the city carry some signal of presence. That their movements mean something. I know I live a fortunate life, I travel, speak in multiple tongues, breathe modern air. But none of it fills me.
I am restless. Exhausted by what should sustain me. Bored by everything good. I have no real complaints. No illness. No tragedy. And yet, I feel empty. I feel infinitely empty.
Sometimes I believe I’m a woman with opinions, tastes, particularities. Then I see my own reflection and do not recognise the image looking back. I know I have a shadow, but it’s on leave.
And still, I fantasise. About being the girl in the lit window. Dreaming of a prince who arrives slowly, lovingly. Someone who sees through the static and softens what feels jagged. The light on her skin becomes a spell: butterflies, soap bubbles, imagined grass, a warm body beside hers.
But I close the fairytale. And return to my own projection. I do not want to be the sad self wandering digital alleys in this swollen Sunday night. I am preparing a diuretic to calm the turmoil.
When morning comes, I plan to colour something. To do one kind thing. To not complain. To be tender with myself, my body, my mind. I will romanticise the sky. I will try to believe in love, not just in glances, but in good thoughts.
And just for a moment, I want to feel overtaken by something bright. A small euphoria. To remember that there is still youth inside me. That the blood still moves. That I am still here, still becoming. That only those who fight to live truly survive.
And then I think of the swing in my grandparents’ garden.
That was the one place where I never had to perform. I bloomed while the potted flowers withered in their season. The food was made with care. The circus was always assembled. The costumes sparkled even under the scent of mothballs. The call to lunch was the best invitation I’ve ever received, an offering of belonging.
The air held the smell of passionflowers and wisteria, rose petals underfoot, hummingbirds overhead. Sweet abstraction.
There is someone with a giant heart waiting for me, I think. I rest my head on my pillow as the girl across the street turns off her lamp, curls to one side, and disappears into dreams.
And the night continues moving, trafficking thoughts, people, shadows. Composing its quiet opera of lives, deaths, and resurrections.
No prince arrives for the complicated girl. That’s the myth.
When I wrote this, I was 21. I didn’t yet understand that what I was capturing wasn’t just melancholy or a moody stretch of early adulthood, it was neurological. A cognitive architecture I was born with, moving faster than I could follow.
This wasn’t depression. It was a restless urgency with no clear destination. An internal frequency that mimicked longing, ambition, anxiety, everything but peace.
For more than a decade, I lived with undiagnosed ADHD, misinterpreting the signals, reshaping them into metaphors. I didn’t know that the time distortion, the emotional volatility, the craving for intensity, the magnetic pull toward chaos, all of it, was part of how my brain functioned. I simply assumed I was too much. Or not enough. Or both at once.
So I turned it into something beautiful. I wrote my symptoms as poetry. I rendered overwhelm as romance. I created narrative from noise, and I called it voice.
Now, at 38, I no longer see a dramatic girl grasping for attention, I see a neurodivergent woman building a survival system with language as scaffolding.
And here’s what else I see now, clearly:
That girl had been conditioned to believe love was something to earn. That worthiness was the reward for smallness. For stillness. For being easy to care for. The world told her that love was conditional, and she believed it. Because when you are young, female, and chaotic, the message is rarely “you are lovable.” It is “become lovable, then we’ll talk.”
No prince arrives for the complicated girl. That’s the myth.
And the love letters? They were never really written for anyone else. They were attempts to shape the formless ache into something legible. We write to imagined lovers, begging them to do the work we can’t yet do ourselves, to see us, hold us, fix what feels unfixable.
But that’s the reversal we miss: the letters were always addressed to us.
The hardest part of love: the part we wait for others to perform, is the part only we can give.
I no longer want to be rescued. I want to be reclaimed.
I am the girl in the window.
If this resonated…
…with your own experience of late-diagnosed ADHD, memory, or creative survival, feel free to share it or reply. I’d love to know what your younger self was trying to say!