A Letter to My Future Self
aspirations for 2021 and beyond.
To my 26-year-old self, on December 31, 2021:
Congratulations on making it through another pandemic year! No, seriously, I mean that with the utmost sincerity. So many of our foundations were shaken when the pandemic hit, turning simple things like going to the grocery store or a coffee shop or a friend’s house or your grandmother’s place into bigger events. In 2020, we saw how connected we all were, that any act outside of total isolation had the potential to impact someone else’s health. We learned that we took these connections for granted, especially during the holidays — as we mourned our inability to see our extended family, it was impossible to ignore the fact that in any other year this time would be dominated by complaints about spending too much time with family. A different form of exhaustion set in.
2021 was another challenge, but you’re at the end of it now and I want to tell you how proud I am of how you moved through this year. Specifically, here are the 4 things that you did that I’m most inspired by:
You watered your friendships.
In 2020, we learned that we had really taken for granted how important our friends are in our life. Simple activities that we did with other people, like going to the movies, for a walk, to the mall, to the coffee shop, to someone’s home for a drink and a laugh and a cry over the absurdity of life, were all gone. Those intimate connections had to be translated over a screen, and even then it wasn’t the same. In a time of forced isolation, maintaining friendships took even more work than usual, and don’t even get me started on building friendships. We realized just how much our connections with other people matter because they didn’t fit into our lives organically anymore.
I am so proud of how you built and nurtured relationships in your life during an absolute drought. You sheltered them, showed up for them, and cared for them even and especially when it felt like the hard thing to do. Because it was often the right thing to do — if your partner is one of the biggest rocks in your life, your friends and family and colleagues and mentors are the whole damn garden. You are better, stronger, more compassionate, more alive to life when your connections with them are cared for. Your life is better for the vibrancy they bring to it.
THANK YOU for tending to your garden.
You moved even though time gave you an excuse to stay still.
For some people, the gift that these past two years have given is forced stillness. Forced time to reflect because there isn’t anything else to do. A time to reconnect with themselves, with their life, with their desires, with what matters.
You tend to spend too much time in this space already, and you could have taken this year as even more of a reason to remain in it, to stay in your head, to do what is necessary to survive but to remain a passive consumer of the world around you.
But you didn’t.
I am so proud of you for constantly moving towards your goals, even when it was the hard thing to do. This is difficult in the best of times for you, since there is survival in your comfort zone and it is cozy enough in here and scary enough out there to keep you satisfied. There is survival in staying still, but there isn’t life, and the coming years are going to be so much better for your efforts now.
THANK YOU for giving me a model, despite an environment that played against you in so many ways, for how I want to live tomorrow, and the day after that, and in the years to come.
You constantly woke yourself up, over and over again, to life.
How easy is it to go on autopilot? To stop learning, to stop challenging yourself, to stop questioning and being curious? I really believe that this is one of the greatest problems of our time, how easy it is to fall asleep to life and lose our souls in the process. How much time did you waste in 2020 endlessly scrolling through your phone? Consuming, consuming, always consuming, never being an active creator of your life or to the lives of those around you. How much effort did you extend to not extend effort? To avoid risk? To turn away from self-discovery? It’s easy, until you’re lifeless.
This just may be the most difficult thing you did all year, with a never-ending end in sight. To wake up to live is a never-ending series of battles, and I don’t know if it ever gets easier. It’s continuous, forever, and it is the most important thing you will ever do again and again and again.
The choices you made to listen to and nurture your soul, to become awake and alive to life, impacted every single other thing in your life: from how you see yourself to your relationships with other people to your relationship with yourself to the actions you took to the changes you made to the impacts you had to the beliefs you hold to what you are capable of doing now. This is the act of doing the inner work that is so desperately needed for real outer change.
I love you so much for this. THANK YOU for being awake to life.
You put the self-discipline in to externally reflect the confidence you feel internally.
Regularly putting pants on in this pandemic has been hard enough, let alone getting dressed in an actual outfit and hair and sometimes makeup look that makes you feel as confident and attractive as you know you are. But you did it. Again, over and over again.
We struggled with this in 2020 — your sparkle got buried beneath the unnecessity of showing up to others, because you were always alone or meeting people over phone so why bother to put the effort in to look as nice as you feel? But that effort, which can feel so burdensome in regular life, reflects how you feel about yourself and over time shapes how you feel about yourself. The two are mutually reinforcing.
You are worth the nice outfit and the fun hair and the pretty makeup, and I noticed that you put in the effort to do these things despite having ‘nowhere to do’ and despite them often being only for yourself. I noticed, and it had an impact, and it made a difference.
THANK YOU for showing up like the stunning woman you are.
Thank you, thank you, thank you for living in this year when it would have been easier just to survive through it. You inspire me, you make me feel capable, and you have set me up for a phenomenal 2022.
Happy new year, babe ❤
