Day 11 - Write a Letter to Myself at 60

Date: January 17th, 2010

When I was in middle school, I had a teacher who wanted all the students to write letters to themselves when they graduated high school.  We were given notebook paper, envelopes, stamps and everything else it took to write a normal letter.  I got bored and doodled all over mine.  I can draw an awesome sarcastic owl.

When the end of high school rolled around I was actually really disappointed when my letter never arrived in the mail.  Not that it would've actually said anything since I just drew pictures all over it, but I didn't remember what I drew and the not knowing was killing me.  Since then I've thought about the exercise and wished that I took it seriously.  I found myself wishing I knew what I wanted when I was 12.  Did I change a lot?  Would 12-year-old me like 18-year-old me?  These are important questions.

I decided it was time to take the exercise seriously and actually write a letter to my future self.  I also figured it would be a relatively easy exercise for the day.  Sweet mother of pearl was I wrong.  It is easy as pie to write a letter if you don't care about what it says.  But then what's the point?  What I wanted to do was give myself a look back at "Kristen at 25" and see what I think.  I wanted a chance, years from now, to really see who I was and how I thought about things.


For the most part I ended up finding it to be a deeply personal experience.  I was very careful to tell the truth to myself.  I'd love to project a confident, perfectly cheerful young woman, but that would be short-changing myself.  The fact is, while I am confident and cheerful, I have a lot of personal fears and apprehensions.  I want to remind myself that those were there when I look back on my life.

There is one paragraph I feel comfortable sharing, so people have an idea of the kind of soul-bearing I'm talking about:

I don’t know if, at 60, I will care so much about having everything figured out. Maybe it’s unrealistic, but I really hope you will have figured out life and family and career by now. I want to know where I’ll be a week from now, a year from now and a decade from now. I’m finally getting to where I can go with the flow a little bit more, but there are so many things that I want to do that take planning and work. I’m afraid that if I don’t figure out as much as possible now, I’ll fail to do the things I care about. I hope you were able to do the things you wanted by now. If not, I hope that you still have time to do them before you die.

 It was a great exercise to go through.  Especially because I was careful to be raw and honest with myself.  There didn't seem much point to write myself a note that was all sunshine and ponies.  What would that show?  At 60, I'd have to look back and roll my eyes at my fake young self.

I would highly recommend taking the time to write your future self a letter.  It can be highly illuminating.  For me especially, I noticed what areas of myself I tend to hide from people because I had to make a conscious decision to include those parts.  My habit has been to leave those, more personal, thoughts out of my communications to people.  It was deeply cathartic not to have to hide those worries anymore, if only for a few minutes.

I've left the letter open because I want to revise it in the next couple weeks.  Not to remove any of the honesty, but to make sure that I put everything in that needs to be in.  I will print it, seal it and put it in a box for myself at the end of February.  Until then, I'll be spending a little time every couple of days looking it over and adding things I forgot before.  I need to put them in now.  Lord knows I won't remember these things at 60.