I originally wanted to do my Free Write Friday post right now, but I don’t have any ideas for the prompt at the moment. I’ll have to do that later on today! I wanted to do this yesterday after I had completed both of my letters to myself. I’ve got to say, I remember watching the episode of The Golden Girls where Dorothy writes a letter to her late father. She said she did it because she never really got to say goodbye to him and that it was really helping with getting things out in the open even though he’d never read it. I’m always dreading reading anything I’ve written in the last ten years, because I was so immature with my words and you can sense how my attitude was back then the more you go on reading them. I’m glad I waited to do the letters now instead of doing them earlier, although we did have to write letters to ourselves when I was a freshman in high school. It was our first day of school and nobody had homework in our resource class and so our teacher had us make these letters to ourselves and at the end of the year we’d get them back. Well, we never got them back and I’m thankful for that!
There’s two reasons of why I wanted to create a past and future list. I wanted one to be like an advice or a guide to my younger self. The future list was mainly an over-bearing question and answer list. I also have two reasons why I picked these two ages, I mainly wanted an age that was the start of everything going downhill. At age 14, I was basically at a standstill between being a middle schooler and going into high school. I was also going through things in my personal life that would kind of “get me ready” in a sense for the next several years of my life. For my future age, I wanted to pick an age where I think I’d feel at peace with, in a way, that’s also a bit of a standstill too. Everybody nowadays says, 40’s is the new 20’s, and I didn’t want to focus on a mid-life crisis or on that phrase, so I choose an age where it would be in the middle of an adult and elderly. Who knows, the world might get more complexed down the line and we may never die. Here are my guidelines into making a past and future letter to yourself:
The past letter:
- Pick an age that has three or more specific things that either at the time made you see the light or had gone downhill.
- When choosing that age, make sure you can remember everything well. While you know about a certain subject that happened at a certain age, as overtime you start to lose of what really did happen before it happened, as it was happening, and after it happened.
- Unless you have a very good memory, don’t select an age from 10 and under.
- Be as honest as you can, share and show us or yourself what you really can remember and how you really felt on that day/night.
- You can share as much as you want, but if you share it on a blog, I think you should censor yourself a little bit. Don’t go into full details in case there are people out there, who don’t like you very much and want to use it against you.
- When you go to give yourself advice for your younger self, I don’t know why I did it or the fact I’m telling you this, but try not to reveal much of what’s to come later on in your life. I might have Back To The Future stuck in my head or something and that’s why I’m saying it.
The future letter:
- I wouldn’t pick an age that’s five or ten years down the line, that’s too soon!
- Unleash any questions you might have bottled up inside.
- In case and god forbid this ever happens, share some memories of small things that you like that might put yourself at ease or make yourself happy that you were able to make it so enjoyable.
- Share what your fears are now but be a little bit humorous too!
- Be as vulnerable as you can as you write about asking about family questions, it might hurt coming out with it now and then too, but you might feel a connection between your two selves when you go to read it,
- Ask yourself one last question from now about how content you are and see if what you’re older says in whatever age you decide to give it to.
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