A letter to my eighteen-year-old self

A few weeks before I graduated college, my mom called my dorm room to tell me that a very odd letter had arrived in a self-addressed envelope, but postmarked in my home town. Given the impossibility of my being two places at once, curiosity got the better of her and she called seeking permission to open it.

The contents—a letter. The author—eighteen-year-old GirlTuesday. The pristine pen strokes stretched across three pages of Five-star college ruled paper, serifs crafted with the authority and care of a confident yet uneasy hand. The tightly-crafted prose portrayed a miniature time-capsule snap shot of my mental musings at one naïve and narrow-minded moment of youth. The assignment—write a letter to yourself upon your college graduation. What do you want to say to the future you? What do you think you’ll be doing? Where will you be living? What will you have accomplished?

As soon as I realized what it was, I insisted that my mother stop reading. What could I have possibly have had to say, at eighteen, to my adult self? And, more importantly, did I dare share it with my mother?

In reality, my predictions were simple. My eighteen-year-old self expected that I would be graduating from the wrong college (I had not, in fact, gotten in to the one I’d predicted in that letter); marrying my high school boyfriend (we broke up two weeks after my arrival at college); finishing up my final season of swimming (I’d quit two years earlier); majoring in the wrong subject (I’d switched from Psychology to English and Political Science); and heading to law school in the fall (this alone was true). But more than the relative inaccuracy of the predictions, the thing that struck me most about that letter was the sheer simplicity of it. My eighteen-year-old self had not ventured to tell my adult self how much leaving home and charting my own course into adulthood would fundamentally shape my personal and professional life. My eighteen-year-old self could not have predicted the tragedy that would befall my teammates, or the precipitous international landscape into which our nation, and the world, were about to be thrust.

That letter is the closest thing to time travel I have ever experienced. And as I sat down to write this week, the question I kept posing to myself was whether, if I were able to, I would want to send a letter back from this moment in time to that eighteen-year-old me. Would I want to temp fate in disrupting the space-time continuum like Marty Mc Fly’s letter to Doc? Is there some bullet-proof vest I want to warn my younger self about?

I thought that I would write that letter here and tell my eighteen-year-old self all the things I should and shouldn’t worry about. I was going to tell myself to have more confidence, to recognize that my achievements were not simply a product of being a large fish in a small pond, to truly embrace the guidance my parents had once given that I could truly do and be whatever I would like to be when I grow up. I wanted to tell myself that there would be heartache, loss, and adversity in the ten-years between then and now. I wanted to tell myself to learn and grow and not dwell upon it. I wanted to tell myself to cherish the friendships, to hold fast to the people who mold and shape who I become, and not to let myself fall out of touch with them.

But the more I thought about it, the more I decided that I would never want to send such a letter. Getting a letter from my past was sort of a gut-check against my dreams and aspirations. It forced me to pause and see how my path had veered from where I had thought I was headed. In contrast, writing a letter from the future to a younger version of myself runs the risk of changing, fundamentally, who I am and who I have become. I’m not trying to proclaim that I enjoyed every moment of my life thus far; nor can I honestly say that I’ve learned lessons from every good or bad thing that has happened thus far. There are things I’ve said, done, and seen that I would like to take back or change. I just don’t think I want to rely on time travel to change any of it; and for now, I am thankful of that.