What advice would you give to your teenage self?
Monday, 23rd February 2026
Advice For My Teenage Self
By Destiny Okafor, Age 9, Grade 4, Room 12
Mrs. Benitez’s Class – Winter Writing Prompt
Okay so first I just want to say for the record that this is a weird prompt because I am nine years old and I do not have a teenage self yet. My teenage self is four whole years away. She might have braces. She might be taller than Grandma Claudette, which Grandma says is impossible because the women in our family “stay sensible,” which is just another way of saying short. But I am going to write this anyway because Mrs. Benitez said to take it seriously and when I said “how can I take it seriously when it doesn’t even make any logical sense,” she gave me THE LOOK, and I know THE LOOK, and so here I am, being serious, which is something I am perfectly capable of when I choose to be.
Dear Teenage Destiny. Here is what I know.
Number One: Do not let anybody say New Corinth is nothing.
I am writing this on a Monday in February and outside it is grey the only way February knows how to be grey, like the sky gave up and went to bed early. The Delaware is doing that thing where it looks like the skin of an old elephant, all grey and crinkled up against the cold, and the cold coming off Minerva Creek is the kind that slides right under the back door no matter how many towels Grandma Claudette stuffs against it. She is in the kitchen right now making the good scrapple – sliced thin, fried hard, the kind that shatters when you press it with your fork – and I can smell it all the way from where I’m sitting at the table in the front room doing this essay, which means things in this house are pretty much exactly right even on a grey Monday in February.
People are going to say things about this city. They already say things and I’m only nine. Taylor’s cousin came down from Philadelphia at Christmas and called New Corinth “the sad one” right in front of me like I didn’t have ears attached to my head. I said, very politely, I said – okay I said it with my face, the one Grandma calls my “courthouse expression” – I said, “At least our river’s got room to breathe.” She didn’t have an answer for that. I thought of a better one later, like I always do, but I was eating and my brain works slower when there’s pie involved.
Here’s what I want you to remember: this city is real. Not real like a postcard is real, not real like the new places down by the riverfront with the fancy lights and the restaurants where a glass of juice costs six dollars. Real like the port cranes you can see from Grandma’s kitchen window moving in the dark before school. Real like the way everybody on Birch Street knows everybody’s name and also everybody’s business, whether they want them to or not. Real like the old man Mr. Sykes two houses down who still calls the creek “the mill run” and means it.
There are people who have lived here eighty years and never left. Grandma Claudette stayed. She stayed through everything she gets quiet about when we walk past the Business Park and she looks at those buildings like they took something from her that she never got back, something she doesn’t have words for, or maybe she has words but not ones she uses with me yet. You’ll understand that look better when you’re a teenager. For now just know that staying in a place, staying and caring about it even when it’s hard, is one of the bravest things a person can do.
Don’t be the one who says “the sad one.” Be the one who stays.
Number Two: You are good at convincing people. You better use it for something worth convincing them about.
I am going to tell you something about yourself and I need you to not be weird about it. You are good at this. You have always been good at this. You could convince people of almost anything if you wanted to, and I mean that in a way that is at least partly a compliment.
Last Tuesday I convinced Marcus to trade me his pudding cup by telling him the cafeteria brand has more sugar than the homemade kind Grandma packs. I don’t actually know if that’s true. He believed me and I got the pudding. That is a skill. Grandma would say that is a bad skill and I understand why she would say that, and Mrs. Benitez if you are reading this please understand that pudding is not important, the skill is important, and the skill is neutral like a hammer is neutral, it just depends what you build with it.
Grandma says some people use their mouth to take things and some people use it to build things. She says the trouble is both of them feel the same in your hand at first. I have been thinking about this for a while now and I think she is right, and I think you – future me – are going to have to decide which one you’re doing every single time you open your mouth, because you won’t be able to do it on accident. People like us who are good at it have to be on purpose about it.
When you are a teenager, here is what I want you to do with it. Talk people into showing up. Talk your friends into coming to the city council meeting when there’s something important happening to Riverside, even when they say it’s boring, because you know how to make things not sound boring when you try. Talk the adults into listening when young people are talking, because adults are not always as smart as they think they are, and I am saying that with respect but also with honesty which is, I believe, a character strength.
Use it for something real.
Number Three: The river is not decoration.
I figured this out by myself and I am proud of it. The Delaware River has been there longer than New Corinth has been New Corinth. It’ll be there after all of us. It is thirty-five to forty feet deep in places, which sounds like a number until you’re standing on the bank and the water is going past in the dark and it stops being a number and starts being a fact you feel in your stomach.
I go down to Minerva Creek sometimes after soccer practice, when Coach Harris lets us out early and I’ve still got twenty minutes before Grandma expects me home. I sit on the flat rocks past the greenway where the path turns and there’s a willow tree that hangs over like it’s tired, and I just watch the water move. It doesn’t care about anything. Not about the grey February sky, not about what’s happening on Market Street, not about anything I’m worried about, which right now includes a math quiz Wednesday, whether Taylor is still mad at me about the thing at recess, and also this wobbly tooth on the bottom left that has been loose for two and a half weeks and I keep poking at it with my tongue because I want it to come out already.
The water just goes. That sounds sad but it isn’t. It means things keep moving even when you’re stuck. When everything feels too big, when being a teenager feels like carrying twelve feelings at once – and I know it does, I watch the older kids on the bus and they look like they’re walking around under invisible weather – go down to the water. Just sit. You don’t have to figure anything out. Just let it be thirty-five to forty feet deep without you for a while.
Number Four: Stop trying to be ready before you are.
This is advice I am giving myself at this exact moment, today, Monday, because of the tooth. Grandma told me three times to stop poking at it with my tongue because I’m going to make it hurt more than it has to. She’s right. But I keep doing it anyway because I hate waiting for things to be finished. I always have.
You probably still do.
But here is something I know about New Corinth that I think is true about people too: things take longer than you think, and the waiting is part of it. This city spent a long time looking bad. The parts that look good now did not get that way overnight. There were years and years of people just keeping things going, just showing up, just staying, before anything started to look like it was getting better. And it’s still going. It’s not done. And that’s okay.
You don’t have to have it all figured out yet. You are allowed to be in the middle of becoming something. The city is still becoming something. You are too. That is not a problem. That is just how it works.
Number Five: New Corinth is going to need you. I already decided this so you don’t get a vote.
I know people are going to tell you that you’re young, that you don’t understand yet, that you should wait your turn. I am telling you right now, from me, who knows you better than any of those people: do not wait. Your turn is always right now. Your turn was before you were ready for it.
I have a plan. I made it this year and it’s a good plan and here it is: student council in middle school, something bigger in high school, something bigger again after that. I don’t know exactly what shape it takes. Maybe something in city government. Maybe something for the schools, because somebody needs to care about the schools and actually make it mean something. Maybe something nobody’s invented a name for yet. I don’t know. But I know it’s for here. I know it’s for this city that smells like the creek and scrapple and cold air off the Delaware and feels like home in a way I don’t know how to explain to Taylor’s cousin from Philadelphia but could probably explain to you.
This city has been through things that would knock most cities flat and it is still standing and it is still trying. It deserves people who are paying attention, people who care not because it looks good on something but because it’s real and it’s theirs. I want to be that kind of person. I want you to still want that.
Don’t let anybody convince you to want something smaller. Not even me, if I try.
So that is my advice. It is more than five things if you count all the parts inside the things, but I think that is okay. I tried to be serious. I mostly was.
It is Monday afternoon now and the scrapple is done and Grandma is calling me for lunch and outside the creek is still going the same colour it was this morning, that dark wet-earth colour it gets in February when the water’s high. The port cranes are moving on the other side of the river. The sky is still grey.
But here’s the thing about grey: things are still happening in it. The cranes are still moving. The river is still going. Things are still being built.
I think you are probably still being built too. That’s good. That’s how it’s supposed to work.
The city’s still here. I expect you to be too.
Your friend, and also you,
Destiny Pauline Okafor, Age 9
23rd February 2026
P.S. If Marcus found this and is reading it: the pudding thing was a joke. Mostly. You still owe me from when you ate the last Tastykake and blamed the cat.
P.P.S. Mrs. Benitez – this IS serious. I told you.
Bob Lynn | © 2026 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.
Vox Meditantis 
Leave a reply to Bob Lynn Cancel reply