I vividly remember the day my literature teacher asked me and my classmates to write a short story for a literature contest in my town. The prize? Having your story published in the most important regional newspaper back then. The incentive was huge, and I could not stop thinking about it.

Until that moment in time, I have never written anything serious besides poems for crushes and things like that. But I loved to write and only needed an incentive to start. Well, it had come, and besides not aiming to be an author, the idea of having something I wrote read by thousands of people awakened something inside me.

I remember that day I came home, sat in front of my old computer featuring an Intel Celeron and incredible 64MB of RAM, opened my text editor, and started typing. But what should I write about? “It must be something epic,” I thought.

Within a couple of hours, I wrote a 600-word story titled “Honor and Valor.” It was about a Roman general who was going to war against a ruthless fictional empire called “The Macedonians.”

It amuses and fascinates me the memory of me thinking back then, “Well, these guys live in Rome and are therefore Romans, so they could not have names like ‘John’ or ‘James.” So I googled common people names used in the Roman Empire and chose a few of them for my characters. And today I know that historic precision plays a big role when you write even a fictional story set somewhere or during some time period that in fact existed. But I did that out of pure instinct and ingenuity.

Long story short, the day to show my story to my literature teacher came. I approached her desk proudly and handed her a couple of A4 sheets with my tale. I can’t forget her facial expressions as she read it. She looked at the story, then at me, twisted her face a couple of times, and asked me, “Have you really written it?” Her voice tone tinged with suspicion.

“Yeah, I did,” I said, almost incanpable to hide how outraged I felt for her doubting I was the one who wrote the story.

“Well, it’s pretty good,” she said while fixing some punctuation issues she found in the text.

My eyes widened up in excitement. “Do you think I have a chance to win this thing?”

Sadness hung in her eyes. “Well, Michael. The story I asked for had to be about something related to our city and culture and not about an old empire.” She sighed. “Your story is pretty good, but that’s the contest rules, and I can’t change them.”

My head sank between my shoulders when I noticed that my usual distraction in class cost me something I really wanted—having my story published and read. Meanwhile, a few classmates circled her and asked to read my story. None of them believed I was its author; I remember one of them even accusing me of having copied it from “Google.”

However, the story was pretty good, way too deep, rich in worldbuilding, and complex for a 16yo boy to have written it. Up to this day, I still feel proud about it. It’s one of the rare memories I have of doing something impressive as a teenager.

So, answering today’s prompt, if I could go back in time and tell something to my teenage self, I’d say, “You are an author, boy!” It would have prevented me from wasting time trying and failing in many professional endeavors I got into since the beginning of my adult life. But, distracted as I was, I think my advice would fall on deaf ears. Life’s hardships and failures teach more than words can do. More than that: wisdom is bought with suffering and frutration; they are the only coins it accepts.

And you, dear reader. What would you say to your teenager self? More important than that: do you think your advice would be heard or ignored? Feel free to comment below and share your thoughts with us!