24th Birthday Letter

Dear Future Me,

Happy Birthday my love!

How does 24 feel? We just turned 23, it felt, much as 22 did, rather inconsequential. I'm really not sure how 24 will feel but, by the time I read this next, I will.

In a therapy session a week or two ago, Dr. Deger remarked that I hadn’t spoken about feeling like a character, like I was performing for an audience, or living for the memoir in some time. I hadn’t realized it, but she was right- somewhere between 20 and 23, I started to feel at home in my own mind.

22 was a big year for me. Around July, I developed a gnawing restlessness that ate away at my inhibitions until I bought a plane ticket, told my boss I was leaving, and flew halfway across the world alone with little more planning than a list of cities I wanted to see.

I needed to go, needed to do something drastic, something the person I wanted to be would do. I wasn’t particularly excited, I barely even wanted to go, I was scared, and I gave myself so damn much permission to be miserable. I needed almost none of it. The growing pains I fretted over barely ever came and I realized, eventually, that I’d probably been the person I wanted to be the whole time. I saw myself, for basically the first time, as someone capable of taking the jump, of making new friends, of feeling free, vibrant, and so fucking full of life and joy.

I remember, vividly, sitting on a beach, on the island of Paros, Greece, with a 30-year-old Australian man I’d met in my hostel the night before and rented an ATV with the following morning. It wasn’t his first time doing a big trip like mine, and when I told him I didn’t know how I’d go back to my old life after experiencing how much more the world could offer me, He said “I reckon it’ll be easier than you think”. That’s the thing about Austrailians, they’re always reckoning something. I realized then that that possibility was far scarier to me.

When I came back home, it was November, it was grey all the time and I spent my mornings staring at brake lights on the highway and my Outlook inbox instead of pounding cigarettes and drinking cappuccinos. I fell into a heavy bout of depression. I felt as though I’d gone halfway around the world to figure out a better way of being and then came back an unchanged person to an unchanged life.

I don’t think that was totally wrong. When you run away from your life, it has a way of catching right back up to you as soon as you stop running. Then the real work starts. If 22 was a year of discovering my capacity for joy and what is required to achieve it, I hope for 23 to be the year of clawing my way toward a life I don’t need to run from.

I’ve considered whether I need to give you some tough love or give you full grace and compassion but I’m a bit late to writing this letter and I’m already a month and a half into 23- I don’t think I need to give you either. What I will give you instead is my trust. I have already watched myself become more intentional with my time and my energy. The motivation is coming more easily because I am no longer aiming to do things for the sake of doing them but because they are aligned with what I want and need. I’m not trying to change myself anymore, I’m just trying to change my life around myself.

My only hope for you is that the life around you on your 24th birthday is even one modicum more aligned with your happiest self. But if it isn’t, that’s okay too. If I know one thing about you, I know that you are, beneath it all, a relentlessly optimistic and resilient person.

I love you relentlessly and I know that by the time you read this letter, you’ll love you even more.