Dear 13-year-old me,

Spiderman was the first movie I can remember that really impacted you. You must have been around four when you first saw it.  Don’t get me wrong, you loved other movies - Robin Hood, Frosty the Snowman, Free Willy - and you watched them all obsessively. But Spiderman wasn’t just a movie for you, it was a whole experience. You felt excited, afraid, and amazed. You wanted Spiderman to win, because he was good and right, and the Green Goblin was just the opposite: corrupt, reckless, and really scary-looking.

You started doing art because of Superman. Dad has that treasure chest full of things from when he was a kid: stamps, baseball cards, comic books. Your favorite comic was the Death of Superman. From the time you could hold a pencil, you sat and traced and redrew the panels -- most of them were rough. Children are not very good artists. But you kept at it because we loved drawing, and you loved Superman. Superman sacrificed his life to protect the people around him, and while he was alive he fought especially hard for groups of people who were marginalized and discriminated against. Remember your excitement when you learned that he had come back to life?

However, the first time you ever saw yourself in a book character was in Harry Potter. Superficially, you still think you are a lot like Hermione - nerdy and bookish, with buck teeth and super crazy, frizzy hair. She is a weird girl with big hair and she is proud of it. You like that. But I remember you most related to one of the teachers, Remus Lupin. You were in this strange situation where you couldn’t really explain why, but you thought you were a little bit the same as this character and you wanted to be like him. I think we had all of these experiences by the time we were seven or eight- like in second grade.

There’s a lot that happens to you by the time you’re in second grade, and you do a lot of learning. You learn how to share and work in a team, you read and write very badly, you watch movies and play pretend, absorbing all of these stories, and trying to figure out where your own story fits in. And you like a lot of stuff, all kids do. And now you're like 13, and from the beginning of middle school until now, none of the stuff that you liked - that was important to you - is cool anymore. I want to ask you if you like Spiderman, or Superman, or if you love to learn, like Hermione. The real answer is yes, but you I know you won't admit it to save your life. It's just not cool.

You've recently become an awkward teenager, and a big part of being a teenager is figuring out who you are and who you want to be. But that identity quest is really hard, especially if you cut yourself off from all of the stories that mattered to you. That’s the stuff that shapes who you are, whether you realize it or not.  That’s the important stuff. And it’s hard to explain, but it’s the truth. You didn’t need the movie Spiderman to teach the difference between right and wrong, but you did need it to teach why you should care. You didn’t need Superman to teach you about social justice, but again, I bet you remember exactly which pages made you care about it -- I certainly do. I learned too late that I feel most like myself when I remember that as a little girl, I modeled myself after comic book heroes and teenage wizards and meddling kids and silly old bears, and when you grow up, you will be happiest when you remember to let yourself love those things.

I guess all of that is just to say: don’t let people back you into a corner and force you to apologize or feel embarrassed about enjoying the things that you enjoyed when you were young. Don’t let people tell you that they’re just stories, or that they don’t matter, or that they’re not real. They became real when you were a little kid and you took all of the stories you loved and all of the characters that you wanted to be and made them a permanent part of you. When you read Peter Pan and loved his sense of adventure you borrowed some of that. When you admired Batman’s mission for justice then you let that become your mission too. When Cinderella was your favorite princess of all time and kindness was important to her, it was important to you. You made the characters real when you made them into yourself.

I hope you remember when you tried to be curious like Alice and joyful like Tinkerbell and wise, like Wonder Woman and brave like Harry Potter. I hope you still have a place for those youthful things in your heart, because (even if you don’t want to admit it) they mattered to you then, and they matter to you now. Stories are the lifeblood of humanity. We need to tell them and we need to hear them, and more than anything else, we need to remember the ones that made us who we are.