Sharpe's Opinion

Stephen Fry writes to his 16-year-old self

Don’t know how I missed this one until now, but Stephen Fry has written a letter to his 16-year-old self, the 16-year-old self who once wrote a letter to him (which he printed in his autobiography Moab is my washpot)

How I admire your arrogance and rage and misery. How pure and righteous they are and how passionately storm-drenched was your adolescence. How filled with true feeling, fury, despair, joy, anxiety, shame, pride and above all, supremely above all, how overpowered it was by love. My eyes fill with tears just to think of you. Of me. Tears splash on to my keyboard now. I am perhaps happier now than I have ever been and yet I cannot but recognise that I would trade all that I am to be you, the eternally unhappy, nervous, wild, wondering and despairing 16-year-old Stephen: angry, angst-ridden and awkward but alive. Because you know how to feel, and knowing how to feel is more important than how you feel. Deadness of soul is the only unpardonable crime, and if there is one thing happiness can do it is mask deadness of soul.

If I, as a 16-year-old, had received a letter like that from my future self, I would have been so angry…