I got a text the other day from a friend I’d lost touch with a few months ago. It was amazing just to hear from him, and he made a suggestion that I’ve been thinking about ever since: as you change course and try to figure out what’s next, write letters to yourself. Letters from your current self to your future self. And letters from your future self to you right now.
I love this idea. And I’m intimidated by it.
I thought I had future-me all figured out. Or at least I had a solid enough outline. That myth got busted pretty hard this winter. I’m not exactly Zoolander asking, “Who am I?” of a puddle, but there are times when that analogy doesn’t feel super far off. So when I finally pick up a pen and do this (I am certain future-me will appreciate handwriting), who am I writing to?
Who will be writing back to me?
A month or so ago I re-read an essay I first saw in 2012: “The Opposite of Loneliness” by Marina Keegan. It’s a letter from Marina to her college classmates, published in the Yale Daily News just before commencement. There’s a passage towards the end where she begs her classmates to remember “we can still do anything. We can change our minds. We can start over. Get a post-bac or try writing for the first time. The notion that it’s too late to do anything is comical. It’s hilarious. We’re graduating college. We’re so young. We can’t, we MUST not lose this sense of possibility because in the end, it’s all we have.”
It's a refrain that comes up more than once in her letter: “We’re so young. We have so much time.”
It’s one in a collection of essays that was published after Marina’s death. She was killed in a car crash five days after she graduated.
As soon as I finished re-reading her letter I went digging around for my high school yearbook. Which, miraculously, I found. I’ve lugged it with me from city to city and apartment to apartment over the years, but I don’t think I’d actually opened it since I was a freshman in college. I remember paging through it all the time that year, whenever I felt lonely or overwhelmed. Re-opening it last month reminded me why.
Holy shit were we optimistic.
One of my favorite sections is “Where Do You See Yourself in 20 Years?” A small sample of the answers from the Class of 2000: “A famous country singer touring the world with my husband and three children.” “Working in a lab curing the world’s most deadly diseases.” “On a yacht near my Hawaiian home with a Victoria’s Secret model.” “Having a 20 truck garage. Full of trucks.” I really hope that last one came to pass.
The most special pages to me are the blank ones - covered in handwritten notes from my classmates. We wrote all over one another’s yearbooks. We’d take our friends’ books for hours or even days at a time as we thought about how to say goodbye. Reading these mini letters now, twenty years later, leaves me stunned. Each one is so wildly hopeful and positive and grand – and it is certain. There’s no wishy-washiness in tone. No hedging. No doubt. ‘You are wonderful. You deserve only the best. You will succeed in whatever you do.’ I remember writing that to my friends. My friends wrote that to me.
I think these scrawled notes seem especially poignant today because, at their core, they’re love letters. The very best kind. They call out all our awesomeness. They give us credit for the impact we’ve had. They tell us that we can and will be anything we want to be – and they mean it. They’re letters that helped me believe in myself when I was eighteen. Turns out they can have the same effect when I’m two months shy of thirty-eight.
“We’re so young” isn’t as true as it used to be. “We have so much time” isn’t something we can count on. But holding tight to our sense of possibility – we can still do anything – I think that keeps us alive. It makes me feel less lost in this moment. It makes me feel less pressure to picture my future self as someone who’s finally figured it out, some fully formed oracle who has all the handwritten answers I’m looking for. Maybe future-me is just a wrinkly-er version who’s still asking, “What’s next?” Maybe she feels a little less scared asking it than I do right now. I wonder if she can feel the wild optimism of it.
Tonight I’m going to sit at my tiny desk on the west coast and I’m going to write my first letter to myself. I don’t know whether it’ll be from future-me or first-night-alone-in-Seattle-what-the-hell-am-I-doing-me. I don’t know where to start. But I know I want it to be about what’s possible. And I want to make it a love letter. Happy Valentine’s Day.
