A Letter To Your Future Self
Over the next week, write a letter a day to your future self.
Instamatic portrait of Tanya at a party in 1989.
Yesterday I was driving home listening to the radio.
The topic of conversation centred around the notion of writing a letter to your future self. The woman interviewed had written a letter, to herself, thirty years from now. She discussed the process of writing the letter and its impact on her future decision making.
Thinking about her future self compelled her to contemplate thorny questions. Things like whether she might want to have children or pursue a high flying career. Might she want to live with a partner or live alone. Did she have a desire to travel widely or stay put in one city, move countries or stay in the place where she was born.
While searching for the interview, which, dang it, I can't find, I do come across an article where actor Hayley Atwell discusses the letters she wrote to her future self when she was eight years old. On her twenty-first birthday, she opened one:
“If there’s any aspect of your life that you’re unhappy with, know that you have the power to change it”
Woah. Inspiring thinking from an eight-year-old. When I was eight, I was not contemplating my future unless you count my dream of becoming a gymnast. I designed many leotards across sheets of A4 paper, colouring them in with my set of felt-tip pens.
For this week, I'm suggesting you write some letters. A letter a day to your future self. Your future self could be one month from now, one year or thirty. You choose. Use a pen and some paper. Neither have to be fancy. It's the words that count.
Perhaps you'd prefer to write as one of your characters to give a story you have some depth and further direction. Whatever works for you.
And just in case you're wondering, that lovely mug above is me from 1989. My friend grabbed my camera and snapped an unposed pic. No internet in those days with tips on how to look good in a selfie. So here I am with a bleached out face from the bright Instamatic flash. We used to laugh a lot at all the random pictures we took of ourselves. I still have most of them stacked in their packets in a box in a cupboard. I like to rifle through them once in a while.
Happy writing.
