#10: Ten Letters to Myself

On the 20th January 2007 I wrote a letter to myself. In four months I will open it.

I have always been one for recording things. I have filled scrapbooks and diaries and notebooks. As if scared of forgetting who I am, I have built an archive of myself in words, but these words are static. So one day I decided to open a dialogue.

I currently have ten letters to myself to be opened a decade after writing. I have not yet opened one.

The letters are a brief check-in, a reminder of who I was ten years ago, but are mainly filled with hopes for the future. Only when I open those letters, the future will have become the present.

I like to think they will remind me of what was important to my younger self. A self whose hopes and dreams lay unashamedly side by side with reality. I hope as I read each letter they will kick-start me, motivate me, remind me who I am.

But when I think of eleven year old me I just cringe.

A lot happens in a decade and I fear that eleven year old me will annoy twenty-one year old me, while twenty-one year old me will disappoint eleven year old me. We are two different people.

Except we are not. Obviously. And I suppose that’s what each letter is — a physical embodiment of the connection between our pasts and our futures. We are all complex kaleidoscopes, as Katie wrote, and an interaction with our past will surely prove that.

The letters came into my head because I turned twenty-one this week. Birthdays always make me reflective, wondering if I am different from the girl that sat in this exact same room a year ago wondering the same thing about the girl who sat here the year before that.

It is like when you walk into a changing room and become trapped between two opposing mirrors, caught in the middle of an infinite number of faces staring endlessly into each other.

Sometimes, you just cannot bear to look.

It is like when you stare at a car crash. You cannot help but stare into yourself even when you want to look away. Because you know you are a car crash. You know all the obstacles you collided with, all the things you accidentally broke when you were looking the other way, you know the times when you were speeding and it felt so free, but you also know the times you were left on the pavement, not sure if you could take much more.

And that is the kind of fascination these letters have for me, a kind of disguised horror at who I was and thought I would be and how who I am now does not deliver.

But they are also a comfort, knowing that even if I do come to look with embarrassment at the person I used to be, that person still exists in those letters. They can still speak to me in a way more physical and immediate than half forgotten memories.

I like the comfort of having physical pieces of my old self, because objects, held in your hands, cannot be forgotten.