write a letter to your younger self essay

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My Breakthrough Moment: Writing a Letter to My Younger Self

Dont let the past control your present. instead, face the past head-on with a letter to your younger self, like the one i wrote..

If you’ve ever sat down to write a letter when you’re mad or upset, you know the experience can be cathartic. It’s the same when you address the letter to yourself — your younger self.

Don’t let the past control your present. If you hold onto things that upset you — even something you’ve done to yourself — it can create a cloud of negativity that follows you around for years.

Instead, face the past head-on with a letter to your younger self, just like mine below.

A Letter to My Younger Self

Dear Kayla,

You’re a full-fledged adult now, can you believe it? At 15, you wanted the years to fly by. Now, I just wish they would slow down. 

It’s not all bad. Being an adult, and all of the freedom that comes with it, is even better than you imagined. The ability to make a pizza at 3 a.m. without mom asking what you’re doing. Heading off on road trips with your husband. Setting your own schedule to do what you want, when you want. I wouldn’t trade it for the world.

There are some things I wish you would have done differently, though. If only you had known then what you know now. That’s why I’m writing to you!

You don’t know it yet, but after you graduated and moved out of mom and dad’s, you struggled to find my place in the world. You bounced from dead-end job to dead-end job. You felt unsatisfied with life. Then, when you started blogging, you finally felt a sense of satisfaction — accomplishment. It took a long time to get there, though.

Be serious about school. It may not seem like a big deal now, but it will later. Listen to your teachers, strive for good grades, study for the SATs and get into a good college. It will make things easier, I promise. Education is how you challenge your thinking and become a better person.

It was in college that you learned more about meat production. It’s where you decided to give up eating meat. It’s been a great decision, and you feel healthier every day for having done so.

I don’t hold my past decisions against myself — don’t worry, you can keep the bacon for now — but I wish there were some other things I had known. Maybe if you would have changed majors, you would have been a little happier? (We both know you love writing poetry, but were too afraid to do anything about it!)

Now, you have a career you love and write poetry as much as you like – just not professionally. Who knows, maybe you’ll get there!

Though you probably should have done some things differently (i.e. branched out more and joined a few clubs and organizations), you’re right where you need to be now.

Don’t give up, even when you feel like you should. Life gets a whole lot better.

How to write your own letter

If you want to write a letter, you may not know where to start. To get a sense of what you want to get out of the letter, start with a simple goal. Maybe you want use the letter as a topic for a college essay. If this is the case, jot down some key areas you wish to address in your letter to get an idea of what points to talk about.

You may not even know what you want from the letter, and that’s okay, too. Just write!

I wanted to confront my mistakes, so I wrote about what bothered me, what I wish I had done, and where I ended up in life.

Doing this felt sort of like a diary, but because I directed the letter towards a more naïve, younger version of myself, it was easier than I thought.

After writing my letter, I felt a sense of clarity like never before. Almost like my life flashed before my eyes, though less dramatic. 

The process meant I had to be honest with myself. What’s the point of writing a letter made for someone else to read? Dig out the heavy stuff.

Who can you get personal with, if not yourself?

If you plan to write your own letter, it’s crucial to detect self-deception — when you lie to yourself.

It can be easy to believe your own lies

We all want to paint ourselves and our past actions in the best light, even when it’s far from the truth. However, real growth comes from brutal honesty. Here's how writing your letter will open things up for you:

A confrontation

In writing a letter to my younger self, I can confront my decisions and gain peace. It’s over — done with. I can’t change it. All I can do is hope to get closure.

The same goes for my decision to stop eating meat. When I first discovered how manufacturers made meat products, I felt guilty for my participation. I believed, because of my purchase habits, I was responsible for the horrible conditions. I lacked compassion for my own choices, whether right or wrong.

At 15, I know I wasn’t thinking about where my food came from and how it was made. I was thinking about boys and college and getting my driver’s license.

In college, I was afraid to pursue a career that I’d really like because I didn’t know how successful I would be. Even if I worked hard, how good could it really get? I decided to major in English instead, which proved to be just fine, but I beat myself up a lot after college for chickening out.

Feeling bad for myself did nothing constructive.

In the end, I was able to write for a living, which is just what I wanted. Though it’s not poetry, I can still pick up a pad and pen whenever I please. Even though it wasn’t in the cards, maybe it will be someday.

The idea is to confront your emotions in a raw and honest way.

If you have any trouble, start with a sentence a day and work your way up to a letter.

How was your day today? How will you make tomorrow better?

Eventually, the thoughts will just flow, and you’ll have written a page in no time.

A sense of peace

If you’re exceptionally hard on yourself, you’re not alone. I’ve gone through the negative cycle of berating myself for past mistakes, even though the outcome can’t be changed. However, self-criticism can take a toll — on both our minds and bodies.

Our brains are trained to distinguish the good from the bad. When we sway from our goals or expectations, we assign a negative value to the experience. 

Writing a letter to my past-self allowed me to access the more compassionate side of my brain — to analyze the situation in a new light.

We’re human, and we all make mistakes, no matter how evolved we are. The trick is to learn from mistakes in order to not make them again. So far, I think I’m doing alright in that department. 

You’ve written the letter — now what?

Once I wrote my letter, I signed it, sealed it in an envelope and — stuck it in a drawer. Sorry if that’s anti-climactic, but it’s the truth.

It’s not about who reads the letter or where it ends up. It’s about the writing process. Typically, dwelling on the past is a vicious cycle, but writing is a healing process that has real benefit. 

When you talk to someone, as in traditional therapy, you get the opportunity to vent your feelings and frustrations. When you write a letter to your younger self, you try to understand and learn from past decisions and emotions.

Don’t just relive past events

Focus on the emotions you felt and consider how you changed for the better as a result. This exercise can be especially beneficial for those who are introverted, like me, and prefer to keep to themselves.

Writing a letter to your younger self isn’t hard. Just pick up a pen and get going. Consider life events that have shaped who you are and how you think. When finished, seal the letter away to reflect on later. Likewise, you can toss it in the trash and consider it the end to a healing experience.

What will you write next?

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Teen Sentenced to 100 Years In Prison Heads to Law School

On June 24, 2001, 23-year-old Abdo Serna-Ibarra was on his way to play soccer with some friends. He never made it. Instead, he got into a fight with a gang of teenagers in a nearby Chicago park.

Mistaking him for a rival gang member, the last words he heard came from the lips of a 15-year-old ordering his friend to “Shoot him!”

A Teenager Receives a 100-Year Sentence Without Parole

Benard McKinley, 16 years old at the time, was arrested for Abdo’s murder. Three years later a jury found him guilty and the presiding judge sentenced him to a staggering 100 years in prison. Without parole .

At just 19 years old, Benard’s life of freedom was over. As far as he knew, he would spend the rest of his time behind bars.

On his way to the maximum security Stateville Prison, he made himself a vow. Despite his grim circumstances and a century-long sentence, he swore he wouldn’t let his new reality define him.

“I promised myself before I got out of that bus that no matter what the outcome was that, you know, I was just going to try to do better for myself.” Benard McKinley via ABC NEWS

​He was true to his word. For the next 20 years, Benard was the epitome of a model inmate in one of the most “violent” and “inhumane” prisons in the country.

He obtained his GED and a paralegal diploma, was one of 40 inmates selected out of 400 to enroll in Northwestern University's Bachelor's degree program (via Northwestern's Prison Education Program, PEP), held several jobs in prison, AND stayed out of trouble.

Along the way, he became interested in the law and spent hours poring over law books. As he became more familiar with the law, he repeatedly petitioned the courts to have his sentence appealed.

He received denial after denial. Benard kept fighting.

From Thug Life and Prison to Law School

Benard McKinley walking through the Arch of Northwestern University

Francesco Thorik-Saboia/The Daily Northwestern

Finally, in 2020, Benard found his redemption. In a rare case, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit threw out his original 100-year sentence. Deeming it unconstitutional to hand out life sentences to juveniles, it reduced his sentence to 25 years.

In the fall of 2023, Benard, along with 15 other prisoners, graduated university with a Bachelor of Science degree in Social Sciences. But he wasn't done yet. Benard had big dreams. He became the first incarcerated person in Illinois history to take the Law School Admission Test. He passed.

In December 2023, after serving 22.5 years, Benard walked out of the prison gates and marched through the arch of Northwestern University. Literally the SAME DAY as per The Daily Northwestern .

Benard partook in the age-old tradition, "March Through the Arch" — a symbolic gesture of the beginning and the end of their university experience for incoming freshmen and graduating seniors.

For Benard, however, marching through The Arch symbolized more than just his academic journey — it symbolized his freedom. Dozens of his classmates and professors showed up and cheered him on.

"Five years ago, I would have never thought that right now, I’d be walking down the Evanston community coming from Northwestern University, as a Northwestern graduate on my way to law school. It’s a hell of a feeling.”

Making Amends and Giving Back to the Community He Hurt as a Teenager

Bernard McKinley during his commencement as part of the Northwestern Prison Education Program at Stateville correctional center

Monika Wnuk/Northwestern Prison Education Program

Officially accepted into Northwestern's prestigious Pritzker School of Law on March 15, Benard starts law school in the Fall. Until then, he is working as a paralegal and a researcher at Northwestern University and living in transitional housing.

After graduation in 2027, he plans to become a civil rights attorney and wants to open a nonprofit legal clinic to support marginalized communities.

He believes that education saved his life and hopes his story inspires others to make positive changes in their own lives.

"Not only do I want to help at-risk youth understand their potential, but I also want to help educate those who don’t believe that people who commit horrible acts can change their lives in a positive way,” he told the Washington Post .

Benard is proof that everyone deserves a second chance. Even those that society first deems irredeemable. Against nearly impossible odds and a whopping 100-year sentence, Benard refused to let his worst mistake define who he was or who he could eventually become.

He is a powerful reminder that no matter how dire the circumstances may seem, it is never too late to turn one's life around.

“From the day after I committed that horrible act, I was focused on bettering myself because I wasn’t my worst mistake.”

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Girl Rescued by Police Officer Grows Up to Become a Cop

In the bustling streets of Kansas City, a tale of resilience and unwavering kindness unfolds, touching hearts across the nation.

Meet Klynn Scales, a young girl whose childhood was marred by adversity and hardship. At just nine years old, she found herself thrust into the role of caretaker for her two younger brothers, stealing food from 7-Eleven to feed them and navigating a tumultuous home life overshadowed by neglect and her mother's battle with addiction.

The troubled childhood a little girl was going through

In the midst of this chaos, a beacon of hope emerged in the form of an unnamed police officer who became Klynn's everyday hero . Despite the darkness that surrounded her, Klynn found solace in the reassuring presence of this kind-hearted officer, Officer Jeffrey Colvin.

His daily check-ins provided a sense of safety and stability in Klynn's turbulent world. She recalls the comfort she felt knowing that Officer Colvin was always there to offer support and protection during her darkest moments.

One pivotal day, when Klynn failed to appear at her usual spot, Officer Colvin's intuition led him to her doorstep. What he found inside was a scene of desperation – a frail and gravely ill young girl in urgent need of medical attention.

Without hesitation, Officer Colvin sprang into action, rushing Klynn to the hospital where she received life-saving treatment for malnutrition. His swift intervention not only saved her life but also left an indelible mark on her heart.

Over two decades passed, and Klynn, now living in another state, lost touch with Officer Colvin. Yet, his memory remained etched in her mind, a testament to the profound impact of his kindness.

Determined to express her gratitude, Klynn embarked on a mission to find her hero, enlisting the help of the Kansas City Police Department. Through their assistance, she finally discovered Officer Colvin's identity and arranged a heartfelt reunion.

How one police officer proved small acts can have big impacts

To her delight, she learned that Officer Colvin had never forgotten her. Their emotional reunion was a poignant reminder of the enduring bond forged through acts of compassion and selflessness.

Inspired by Officer Colvin's example, Klynn made the decision to pursue a career in law enforcement . As she prepared to graduate from the police academy, she had one special request – she wanted Officer Colvin to pin her badge at the ceremony.

Touched by her request, Officer Colvin traveled to Texas to fulfill her wish, witnessing firsthand the remarkable journey of the young girl he had once rescued. Proudly reflecting on Klynn's achievements, he remarked on her resilience and determination to defy the odds stacked against her.

In a touching tribute to her lifelong hero, Klynn presented Officer Colvin with a plaque bearing the words, "A promise made, a promise kept, walking in the footsteps of a true hero!"

It was a fitting homage to a man whose kindness had not only saved her life but also inspired her to pursue her dreams. Their story serves as a powerful reminder that heroes can be found in the most unexpected places and that even the smallest acts of kindness can leave a lasting impact on those in need.

Copyright © 2024 Goalcast

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Journaling Prompt: A Letter to Your Younger Self 4

ONE WONDERFULLY EFFECTIVE JOURNALING TECHNIQUE is to write a letter to a younger version of yourself. The letter can be to yourself at a specific age or just the general “younger” you. Following is an example of such a letter written by a woman to herself at the age of fourteen and, below that, questions for discussion about what this technique offers the journal writer.

A Letter From One Woman to Her Younger Self

Questions for discussion (use the comment area below to respond).

• What does a letter like this reveal about the writer as she looks back on life? Another way of putting this question is: What can she (the writer) learn about herself through this exercise? –
• How would writing to her future self be different in nature and quality? –
• If you were to write to your younger self, at what age would you choose to write to yourself? –

Try it yourself — The Full Exercise

• Think back to a time in your life when you could have used advice from a wiser you. –
• Before writing, take a moment to close your eyes, breathe deeply, and bring yourself back, back in memory to that time in your life, re-experiencing the event, emotions, and thoughts of that time. –
• Think about what you have learned about yourself and life since then. –
• Write your letter. –
• Wait a day or two, then read your letter with fresh eyes. What do you notice? What emotions come up for you? What might you change in your life today as a result of what you wrote? Take a few minutes to journal your honest responses. –
• Come back her and share a little about your experience. (Let’s learn together.)

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4 thoughts on “ Journaling Prompt: A Letter to Your Younger Self ”

My immediate thought was that I’d like to actually do this prompt and I know what the theme would be. Forgiveness. I would like to forgive my younger self for all the stupid stuff I’ve done and the risks I took. Just saying it here is helpful but actually writing at length would be much better. It’s been a long time since a prompt hit a nerve like this one. Thanks!

Suellen, forgiveness is a wonderful theme/letter to write to a younger self. We could all use a little forgiveness, particularly from our harsh judging inner critics. Thanks for sharing.

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An open letter to my younger self: you'll make it through.

It’s not too late to be the person you needed when you were younger.

It’s never a wrong time to give yourself what you need.

If what you need is forgiveness for past wrongs or acceptance of who you are today or appreciation for how far you’ve come , this open letter is yours to read.

These are the things I wish my younger self knew, things you might be able to relate to.

“If you must look back, do so forgivingly.” — Maya Angelou

A Letter to My Younger Self

First things first, you’re going to make it through — through this, through everything.

No matter how terrible things seem, it’s not the end of everything.

If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.

Now... right here, right now... this is yours. This is your life. The way things are right now? They won’t always be this way. Things are going to change, you are going to change. But whatever your life is in the moment, it’s yours to claim. So claim it.

Own your life. Make decisions you can feel good about. Claim every single breath you take. Embrace the moment and make it yours . Nobody else is going to do it for you. Nobody else can think for you, can love for you, can live in your place.

You must do your own believing, your own forgiving, your own living.

And this is how you live with little regret: you embrace everything you experience, even the things that don’t feel good. Because when you do that, you do what you came into this world to do: you come alive.

Every up and down, every tear and thrill. This life is yours and you have no reason to apologize for who you are.

There's a place and a purpose for everything under the sun, including you .

You don’t have to apologize for figuring yourself out. You don’t have to be like everyone else. You have your own place in the world, your own worth.

In all the millions of ways you can be told you're not enough, don't believe even one of them.

Exactly who you are is exactly who you're meant to be. Accept yourself now, and you’ll be amazed at the person you become.

Accept yourself here. Accept your life now. This is the secret to change and success and happiness — it’s hidden right out in the open, right in the present moment, right in your heart.

Sure, you’re going to stumble. And you’re going to learn. And you’ll grow and you’ll trip over your own feet long after you thought you had it all figured out. That’s okay. You’re in good company.

Some walks you’ll still have to take alone, but that doesn't stop you from being a child of this earth, with the soul of the whole universe in your lungs .

To be alive is a precious thing  —  don’t forget that and don’t minimize your own existence. Don’t doubt how important you are. You can’t even imagine how important you are.

But don’t take yourself too seriously, either, because nobody has it all figured out. (Even the ones who think they do.) Everybody has scars, is afraid of something, and wants more than anything to belong .

In fact, the more you learn the more you'll realize how little you know. That's the difference between knowledge and wisdom. If knowledge is power, then wisdom is strength.

One day you'll realize how much strength it takes to lean on others , how being vulnerable means being real, how forgiveness heals .

Pay attention to what heals you, and stay close to it.

When you're afraid to love again, go ahead and love one more time.

When you're afraid to ask for help, go ahead and ask anyway.

When life throws you down, consider it a privilege to stand back up again. Show the world how you turn pain into love , an ending into a beginning, darkness into light. Be your own rescuer .

Lastly, for now, know this:   that it’s never too late to be who you might have been.

What's one thing you'd tell your younger self, if you could?

Tell me in the comments. I read every single one, and I'd love to know!

P.S. Want these kinds of posts in your inbox?  Sign up for Tuesday emails  and you'll also get my Healing Brave Manifesto, totally free.

Comments on this post (16)

Thank you, Nikki! I have reached out to the owner of that blog requesting a credit. :)

— Jennifer Healey

FYI you’ve been plagiarized at https://www.positivemindset.blog/mental-health/reminders-for-my-younger-self/ unless this is you in a different name.

if i could go back in time to have an interaction with my younger self i would slap myself in the face.

Lee, I am glad this is something you can begin your journey with. The self-understanding and compassion that comes forth is powerful. Many blessings on your way. x

Thank you for the inspiration. It was suggested that I write a letter to the young Lee to be able to get through a weight loss blocker but I didn’t know how or where to start.

This will help me get that pen to paper and begin this journey to self healing. Your words have resonated with me and I now feel confident that I can do this.

Thanks again Cheers, Lee

— Lee Carter

Don’t go to nether with diamonds !!!!!

— Kavya Patel

If I could, just speak once to my younger self, I would say: As you grow up things will happen in life which will seemingly knock you backwards. You are not damaged, nor broken because of this. You are coping the best you can, as someone who is lacking the tools and support to deal with adversity in life. Nothing about you is a mistake. Sadness will embed itself in the lines of your face and in your movement. But do not let it weigh you down. Make sure to speak to someone, and share its’ load. And at the end of the day, when you feel weak and tired; Please remember that you are not alone

Dear younger self, Forgive, forget and move on. When life puts you in a box with only one way out, jump down. It is not the faith in the fall but the faith in the landing. Because the landing will help you fly tomorrow.

Dear Jennifer Thanks a lot for these wonderful and inspirational words, they touch my heart also my mindset… You don’t know how your typing affected me. I really appreciate what you do for inspiring people in general . Be fine and enjoy in your life . With big love and peace/ Rana

12-8-20 Tuesday

I’d LET MY inner child to be thankful FOR being alive & THAT SHE’S loved JUST THE WAY SHE IS. & THAT I’m HER NEW mom & 💘 Love HER FOREVER & ever!!!

— Jane Ellen Barron

Sherrie, your words are beautiful and they’re a light for myself (and anyone else who reads them) as we keep moving forward. It’s not easy to forgive – perhaps why it’s so moving, and so important. Thank you for sharing how this practice helped you. I plan on doing this more often from now on because it was so powerful for me, too. Take care. x

— Jennifer Williamson

I wrote a letter to my younger self a couple of days ago. It was the most emotional experience I have ever had. I needed to forgive myself for the missed milestones of life (childless for one) and the emotional and physical damage I inflicted on myself over the years. When I narrowed down the point at which I made the worst decision in my life, that’s the me that I needed to apologize to and forgive. Ultimately, 47 years of damage that needed to be addressed. It is my sincerest wish that I can finally rest my guilt and pain, and substitute it with forgiveness. Its hard to be kind to others when you have yet to forgive yourself. I have now. I regret that it took me so long, but I forgive myself for that too. I highly recommend a letter to one’s self.

I am grateful for your friendship and support and the light you shine on everyone around you, Jim. Thank you.

Don’t ever feel afraid as we are always here to catch you from falling and anyway my darling what if you fly. My precious butterfly we love you. Smile look after your own beating heart always. Goodnight God bless

Jen, Your letter is beautiful…”We rebuild together.” Thank you so much. Bless you. Let the sunflowers grace you with their beauty as you grace them with yours.

Jen, Wow. I’ve said this before. Amazing! You are amazing. You are a beautiful person in so many ways. A writer, an artist, a cherished friend. Your future is still to come. Enjoy it. Live it. Love it. The best you can.

Leave a comment

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30 Prompts for A Letter to Your Younger Self

Writing a letter to your younger self is a way to acknowledge your experiences, learn from the past, and live in your truth. Moreover, it helps you build rapport with yourself. By engaging in this exercise, you can discover a different side of yourself. This may include painful and joyful memories, which are all part of your experiences.

What would you tell your younger self? -An important question to think about when going through the prompts and writing your letter. There may be things you are not proud of in your letter, but it is always important to practice self-compassion. The idea behind the letter is to reflect and let go, and it may bring healing for some people. Therefore, your letter should not feel rushed or forced. Whenever you are ready, these 30 prompts for a letter to your younger self can guide you.

How to write a letter to your younger self?

-Choose an ideal time, void of distractions. This is a time to reach deeper and possibly discover things about yourself you’ve kept hidden. Eliminate anything that will keep you away from that.

-Your younger self can be a year or a few years younger. It helps to pinpoint what phase or age of your life you are reflecting on before starting.

-This letter serves a personal purpose, but that does not mean you can’t mention other characters that played a role in your life.

-You can start with “Dear younger self” to make it personal or diary-like.

-You can take notes before writing your letter. The direction of your letter is up to you. It could be structured; for example, ‘advice to younger self ‘or you can keep it simple in the form of freewriting.

Journaling prompts

1. what did you enjoy most about your experiences.

You can write about: The experiences you had and how they have shaped you presently. In addition, you can add pieces of advice you would give yourself. For instance, a piece of advice for this prompt would be to enjoy present experiences.

2. Did you try, even when the unknown felt scary?

You can write about: Moments you were afraid to give yourself a chance or get out of your comfort zone.

What would you say to your younger self here? Perhaps, the unknown is only scary because you are afraid to try.

3. Describe a time you relied on or cared too much about others’ approvals.

Talk about the period you were concerned about and what other people thought of you. This is a battle many people face due to a lack of self-love , self-judgment, and judgment from others. Don’t be afraid to explore your emotions and the impacts these have had on you. Have your thoughts changed? If so, how?

4. Talk about a time you felt guilty or were made to feel guilty because you prioritized yourself.

Maybe, you were in a situation in which you were expected to assume responsibilities too heavy for your age and chose yourself. You can discuss how other people played a role in the emotions you felt or are currently still feeling.

5. Reflect on a time you felt out of place because you could not relate to other people.

Ever experienced moments you wanted to assimilate and felt like you lost yourself? What advice would you give to your younger self now that you’ve overcome those feelings?

6. Was there anything you considered a mistake at that point in your life?

Acknowledging your mistakes is essential if you don’t want them to take over your life. You’ll make mistakes, but the most important lesson is your course of action after those mistakes. You can write about how the mistake made you feel in your letter. Mistakes are not intentional, so how do you handle them now?

7. What is something you have always been grateful for?

Let gratitude be a part of your letter. As much as your reflection may include negative experiences you want to heal from, talking about situations in which you felt grateful can be therapeutic as well.

8. Detail periods you felt uncertain about your path.

There is so much in life that is out of your control. First and foremost, it is important to accept to let go of certain things. This prompt can help you talk about a time you did not know what was to come and how it made you feel. For example, you started college and were undecided about your major, and that scared you.

9. Something that you should have focused on more.

This can mean something different based on the individual. What is something that deserved your attention? For example, you can include the important thing(s) to which you should have dedicated more time to.

10. In detail, talk about what forgiving yourself and others has done for your personal growth.

It is enlightening to be able to see how far you’ve come when you learn to forgive. Your letter can contain the experience as well as the steps you took to reach this point of forgiveness. If you have not been able to forgive, journaling how you feel can be a helpful first step.

11. What are some things you thank yourself for because you practiced patience?

Being patient is beneficial for decision-making and can also reduce stress. Here, you can talk about the positive impacts of practicing patience with yourself.

12. Describe a time you felt you were not there for yourself.

It may have been a difficult time where you had problems with your confidence and weren’t supportive of yourself. Give yourself the chance you feel those emotions if you have not dealt with them yet.

13. Write about the memories you created with your loved ones. How have these impacted you?

Support from loved ones can enhance mood and positively impact life overall. In the letter to your younger self, talk about the moments and memories you cherish.

14. Is there anything you obsessed over? Do you feel this has held you back in a way?

Social media and comparisons are all examples of elements that contribute to self-criticism. In addition, these elements can lead you to obsess over things that are outside of your control. You can talk about moments in which you had these experiences.

15. Talk about the time you honored your choices, even with opposition.

Your values and beliefs are important; therefore, refusing to compromise them is commendable. Talk about times you’ve placed importance on your values. This does not have to be a success story for you to put in your letter.

16. What are some pieces of advice you felt you should have listened to? Even if you did not apply those pieces of advice to your life then, do you feel it would be helpful now?

Not every piece of advice you’ll receive is helpful, but there is always room to learn. There may have been someone in your life who gave you advice that you did not take seriously. Talk about what you learned from that.

17. Was there a time you took learning into your own hands? How did that make you feel?

This could have been when you started your self-improvement journey. It may have involved engaging in something you felt would lead to personal growth. Maybe, you decided to learn a new language. What was it for you?

18. Did you ever feel like you failed in life? How did you handle it?

Just like mistakes, failure is a part of life. As you reflect in your letter, understand that these shouldn’t be carried on as disappointments. Let go of the pain this might have caused you by changing your mindset and the way you view failure.

19. Talk about your passion and the redirections in life.

Are you doing what you always wanted to do? If not, it is okay. Sometimes, life redirects you and it can be confusing. There might even be a time when you feel you have to start all over. Talk about these moments and how these redirections/changes have paved your current life.

20. Describe your most painful friendship breakups & friendships you kept.

Throughout your life, there will be those who are passing and those who are long-term. Did you have any of these experiences and how do you feel about them now?

21. If you were in a romantic relationship during the year you’re reflecting on, talk about your experiences whether bad or good.

An example of this will be feeling guilty about leaving a toxic relationship. Love is not enough to sustain relationships and certainly not, toxic relationships. On the other hand, you can talk about the moments that led to meeting your current partner.

22. Did you listen to yourself enough?

Self-care is essential to incorporate in various areas of life. Were you attentive to your needs and did you prioritize your health?

23. You can write about your finances during this time. Did it impact you in any way? Learned anything from it?

The letter to your younger self can also speak about financial experiences. You may have learned the importance of budgeting, investing, and saving during that time.

24. Talk about the importance of protecting your feelings and setting boundaries.

This is necessary to avoid unhealthy relationships. Highlight the time you established your boundaries and how this has helped you mentally and emotionally.

25. List the times you were able to reach out and ask for help.

Some people find it difficult to reach out and ask for help. Is this something you ever had trouble with? If so, which moment changed it?

26. Was there a defining moment for your self-love? If so, detail it.

Self-love can be different from one person to the next. Talk about what self-love means for you. For example, you’re more honest with yourself, you have self-respect, or you’re more trusting of yourself. If you’ve ever had trouble with loving yourself, what caused it?

27. Did you learn how to balance it all?

Life can become overwhelming, especially with personal and external expectations. A balanced lifestyle can be extremely helpful in reducing stressors and improving mental health. Provided that, how did you create balance in your life?

28. In detail, write about the time(s) you were engaged in people-pleasing behaviors.

Selflessness can be rewarding, but there is a downside when it becomes excessive. Being overly caring without boundaries can lead you to become a people-pleaser. Do you feel like you had this experience before? What would you tell your younger self about those experiences?

29. Talk about a time you felt abandoned, let down, or discouraged.

While realistic expectations can be healthy, they can also cause hurt when people don’t meet them. Have you been hurt by having high expectations of someone? Or, did you not meet the high expectations you had for yourself? Also, how did this change your approach?

30. Explore the positive qualities you’ve noticed during this time.

Writing these down can show you exactly what you find admirable about yourself. You can also elaborate on these qualities and talk about how they have helped you.

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How to Write a Letter to Your Younger Self (5 Steps)

Have you ever looked back at photos of yourself as a kid or teenager and wanted to have a conversation with that younger you? 

I do it all the time! I see my depressed 18-year-old self trying to dress and speak like my popular friend and cringe. I wish I could give that unconfident girl some words of advice. 

Writing a letter to your younger self allows you to have that heart-to-heart and pass along some of the life lessons it took you years to learn.

I view it as a super imaginative yet meaningful exercise. By pretending to send advice back through time, you crystallize what really matters in life by sharing it from the wiser place you currently inhabit. 

In this post, I’ll go through how to write a letter to your younger self to achieve growth, reflection, and better days to come! 

Table of Contents

Why It’s Worthwhile to Write a Letter to Your Younger Self 

Writing a letter to your younger self is fulfilling for so many reasons — there’s so much to gain from the process. 

Reflect On Your Life Journey

Writing a letter to your younger self allows you to reflect deeply on the timeline of your life so far. 

You can contemplate the key choices you made around relationships, careers, or moving to new places, as well as obstacles you overcame, like struggles in school, rocky friendships, or setbacks in jobs. 

Hindsight provides a valuable perspective on all of it. Looking back, I realized that everything I thought was the end of the world was just making me stronger and growing me into the person I was meant to be. 

Related Post: 7 Actions to Take When You’ve Lost Your Spirit and Love for Life  

Provide Encouragement and Motivation

Armed with the wisdom you’ve cultivated, you can give your younger self much-needed encouragement, reassurance, and motivation. 

Perhaps you struggled with self-confidence, dating, or peer pressure growing up. Communicate the support you wished you had — be the wise, caring voice your younger version needed.

Doing this makes you hyper-aware of the emotions and inner critic you still wrestle with today. Getting to name your insecurities explicitly and then speaking truths backed with years of experience to comfort them can be really powerful. 

It helps you identify areas for personal growth while also seeing how far you’ve come.

Share Hard-Won Life Lessons

Writing a letter to your younger self gives you the chance to articulate meaningful life lessons and hard-earned wisdom. 

For example, maybe you wish you had known how important it is to take more chances personally and professionally rather than always playing it safe. Or that worrying so much about what other kids in school thought about you was such wasted emotional energy. 

I remember just wanting to fit in in high school, but now I know how little those social dynamics matter in the grand scheme of things!

How to Start Writing a Letter to Your Younger Self 

First, vividly picture your younger self at a specific age — maybe focus on your teens, 20s, or college years. Visualize what you looked like at that time and try to tap into how you felt emotionally. Basically, get into that headspace again. 

Think about some of the key decision points or toughest challenges you faced at that age. 

Were you struggling with big choices like which college major to pursue? Dealing with bullying or mean girl drama? Trying to figure out romantic relationships?

Really put yourself back in that timeframe when you felt uncertainty, fear, or confusion the most.

Then ask yourself — knowing what you know now and having the wisdom of your current age, what specific advice do you wish you could share with your younger struggling self? Are there critical truths or pieces of guidance that you know now that would’ve comforted or motivated you back then?

For example, maybe you wish you could tell your college-age self that constantly comparing yourself to others on social media will not serve you and that the path society tells you that you “should” take is not necessarily the right one for you. 

Really listen and tap into what your younger self most needed to hear. 

The words that you need to share will become clear as you time travel in your imagination through this unique writing exercise. 

Related Post: 13 Ideas I’m Letting Go of As I Turn 26

Tips to Write a Letter to Your Younger Self 

1. focus on 2-3 pieces of advice to share .

When deciding what to write in your letter, focus on identifying the 2-3 most important and helpful pieces of advice you want to share with your younger self. 

Be discerning and prioritize the life lessons you believe would have guided your younger version in the most meaningful ways.

For me, one of the things I wrote in my letter to my younger self was regretting not seizing opportunities like studying abroad in college because I let fear hold me back. And I made it clear to my younger self that saying yes to those chances for growth truly outweighs any temporary discomfort.

This is why I’m keenly applying for jobs and internships overseas today — I don’t want to feel that regret again. 

Remember: When writing the advice, be honest but also speak to your younger self with great compassion. The goal is to inspire positive growth, not guilt over the past.

2. Own Your Mistakes and Missed Chances

An impactful part of this exercise is taking ownership of poor choices you made in the past or chances you failed to take. 

We all have regrets , and that’s very human. By reflecting on them, you gain wisdom to guide your current, older self.

For instance, examine key mistakes like relationships you stayed in too long, toxic friendships, jobs you left hastily, or addictions you battled for years. How might things have played out positively if you walked away sooner?

3. Describe How You Overcame Hardship

There’s massive value in using your letter to share how you eventually overcame an obstacle or hardship from that period in your life that was incredibly difficult to deal with. 

For example, maybe you struggled with a health issue, the loss of a loved one, family turmoil, or the failure of a business idea. You can validate the pain your younger self-experienced but also reassure them that though it takes grieving and time, you eventually got through it all by rediscovering your grit and fighting spirit. 

Hearing how you found resilience in the end to press forward provides comfort and encouragement.

4. Visualize the Ripple Effects

Envision how getting this letter with future life advice from your wiser self would have created a ripple effect to improve so much of the rest of your life. 

For example, if your younger self avoided a bad career choice or relationship breakup, how might the trajectory of the coming years have been brighter? Maybe you would have met your spouse or lifelong friend circles sooner or pursued that passion like the arts or traveling. 

Mapping out alternate positive scenarios that never happened yet will inspire you today.

Related Post: I’m Finally Living as Myself: 5 Ways You Can Too

5. Set a Reminder to Re-read Your Letter

After putting so much thought into your letter to your younger self, keep it somewhere safe, like your journal or a storage box. Then, set a yearly reminder on your calendar to pull out and re-read the letter, maybe on your birthday or New Year’s Eve.

Seeing your letter again on an annual basis allows you to reflect on how much more wisdom you’ve gained since originally writing it. It also helps you consider how your perspectives may have grown or changed on the advice you offered yourself.

The reminders of how far you’ve come and how you visualized life unfolding differently can recharge your sense of hope if you ever feel stuck in the present.

Final Thoughts 

Writing a letter to your younger self is such a valuable way to reflect on life’s journey so far. 

I hope you feel inspired to have an imagined conversation across time to share your wisdom. 

Please leave a comment below on any crucial advice you’d give your younger self or takeaways you had from trying this exercise. I’d love to hear your thoughts!

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I started this blog to guide myself through tough times. I hope it will act as a beacon of inspiration for you too. Thanks for being here. 

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Letter Draft

Letter to My Younger Self

Writing a letter to your younger self is a powerful and introspective exercise that involves crafting a heartfelt message addressed to the person you were in the past. The purpose of a “letter to my younger self” is to offer advice, share insights gained through life experiences, and provide encouragement to navigate the challenges that lie ahead. It serves as a reflective journey, imparting wisdom to the younger version of oneself.

Embarking on this journey of self-reflection, our upcoming article will guide you through the art of composing letters to your younger self. We understand that this process can be both therapeutic and enlightening. Therefore, in the following sections, we will generously share templates, examples, and samples of such letters. Our goal is to provide you with a diverse range of resources, making it effortless for you to express your thoughts and offer valuable guidance to your past self.

As we delve into the world of personal retrospection, be prepared to uncover a wealth of inspiration and practical advice. The article is not just about crafting letters; it’s about connecting with your past, embracing growth, and creating a bridge between the person you were and the person you’ve become. So, let’s embark on this poignant journey of self-discovery and heartfelt communication through letters to our younger selves.

Sample of Letter to My Younger Self

Dear Younger Me,

As I pen down these words, I am filled with a mix of nostalgia, gratitude, and a desire to share some insights that time has bestowed upon me. Life’s journey is an unpredictable adventure, and as you stand at the beginning of this winding road, there are a few things I want you to know.

Firstly, embrace change. It’s the only constant in life. The twists and turns may seem daunting, but each presents an opportunity to grow. Don’t fear the unknown; rather, see it as a canvas waiting for your unique brushstrokes. Challenges will come, but so will your strength to overcome them.

Secondly, cherish relationships. In the hustle of life, it’s easy to overlook the importance of the people around you. Take the time to nurture connections, be it family or friends. These bonds will be your pillars of support during stormy days, and the shared joys will make the sunny ones even brighter.

Lastly, believe in yourself. You possess a reservoir of untapped potential. Don’t underestimate your abilities. Dream big, work hard, and never let the fear of failure deter you. Mistakes are stepping stones to success, and every stumble is a lesson in disguise.

As you navigate the tapestry of time, remember, you are resilient, you are capable, and you are destined for greatness.

[Your Name]

How to Write a Letter to My Younger Self

1. embarking on the journey.

Life is an unpredictable odyssey, and writing a letter to your younger self is akin to embarking on a reflective pilgrimage. Begin by delving into the recesses of your past, extracting lessons, and preparing to impart the wisdom gained along the way.

2. Choosing the Right Tone

Your younger self deserves a letter that resonates. Select a tone that balances empathy and guidance. Whether it’s a comforting embrace or a firm nudge, the words should echo the essence of your experiences without overwhelming.

3. Crafting Authentic Narratives

The power of your letter lies in authenticity. Share personal anecdotes, triumphs, and tribulations. Unveil the layers of your journey with candor, allowing your younger self to connect with the genuine fabric of your life.

4. Nurturing Reflections

Reflection is the cornerstone of this endeavor. Encourage your younger self to reflect on pivotal moments, decisions, and the emotions that accompanied them. This introspection is the compass guiding them toward personal growth.

5. Embracing Vulnerability

Vulnerability is a testament to strength. Don’t shy away from sharing your vulnerabilities and acknowledging the mistakes made. It’s through these cracks that the light of resilience and growth permeates.

6. Weaving Insights into Action

The insights shared should be more than mere words. Guide your younger self in transforming these lessons into actionable steps. Empower them to make informed choices and navigate the complexities of life.

7. Closing with Affirmation

Conclude your letter by affirming the incredible journey that awaits. Express confidence in their ability to overcome challenges, embrace opportunities, and evolve into the remarkable individual they are destined to become.

As you embark on this epistolary expedition, remember that your words are not just ink on paper; they are a beacon illuminating the path for your younger self.

FAQs about a Letter to My Younger Self

In the realm of self-reflection and personal growth, writing a letter to one’s younger self has become a poignant and popular exercise. Many individuals embark on this journey to impart wisdom, share experiences, and offer guidance to their past selves. In the following FAQs, I’ll address common inquiries about this introspective practice.

1. Why write a letter to my younger self?

I believe crafting a letter to your younger self serves as a therapeutic and insightful exercise. It allows you to reflect on your past, acknowledge growth, and provide guidance to your younger, less-experienced self.

2. How do I choose what to include in the letter?

In my opinion, focus on pivotal life moments, lessons learned, and personal growth. Share experiences authentically, emphasizing what shaped you and offering valuable insights that your younger self can benefit from.

3. Is there a specific format or structure to follow?

While there’s no rigid format, organizing your thoughts chronologically or thematically can enhance clarity. Begin with a warm introduction, delve into anecdotes, share lessons, and conclude with empowering affirmations.

4. Should I be vulnerable in my letter?

Absolutely. Vulnerability fosters connection. Share your challenges, setbacks, and how you overcame them. It creates a genuine and relatable narrative that can resonate deeply with your younger self.

5. How do I turn insights into actionable advice?

Translate your insights into practical steps. Offer your younger self tangible advice on navigating challenges, making decisions, and embracing opportunities. Transform wisdom into a roadmap for personal growth.

Remember, writing a letter to your younger self is a personal and subjective journey. It’s a conversation with the past that holds the potential to illuminate the path toward a more informed and empowered future.

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Writing A Letter to My Younger Self Helped Me Find Closure

I started journaling when I was nine after finding empty journals lying around the house, waiting to be filled with words. Writing helped me make sense of my thoughts and express the emotions I couldn’t verbalize. Experiencing such strong feelings at a young age meant journaling, for me, was like untying several knots of rope. Then a family member found my journal and read my thoughts back to me, and I never opened a journal again. The mere thought of being humiliated and exposed was enough to stop writing. And so I didn’t. I bottled up my emotions, no longer having a way to release them. 

“ Experiencing such strong feelings at a young age meant journaling, for me, was like untying several knots of rope. ”

When I began therapy a few years ago, a part of my healing journey included recalling events from my childhood, many of which I’d forgotten. My therapist mentioned that some adult triggers result from unmet childhood needs. She suggested I try to journal, assuring me that it would help guide our sessions and give me the courage to be vulnerable again. But I hadn’t picked up a journal since the day my privacy was invaded, and the mere thought of writing made me feel anxious. I didn’t follow up on her suggestion. I couldn’t bear being vulnerable with writing or myself again. 

As time passed, I realized pieces of me had been missing because writing was one of my first loves. I couldn’t quite pinpoint this emptiness, but it felt as if I was full of reckless emotions with no way to express them. When I read a story about how letter writing brought two family members together, I knew it was a sign for me to try and write again despite my fears. 

“ I pictured the current version of myself having a conversation with that younger version of me. ”

I sat on the floor of my walk-in closet with soft music playing. I thought back to when I was younger, remembering all of my responsibilities at such a young age. Being the oldest daughter meant taking on tasks that sometimes took me away from my childhood. It meant hearing about family issues and trying to fix others’ problems.  

I pictured the current version of myself having a conversation with that younger version of me. I had more emotions than I could account for as a child. What would I want to tell her? What would she say to me? From that space, I began to write. 

I wrote a letter to my younger self, telling her how we would navigate difficult experiences and overcome challenges. I wrote to her about our first major breakup: “You silly girl. You are not asking for too much. I want you to demand more.” 

“ I wrote to her about our first major breakup: “You silly girl. You are not asking for too much. I want you to demand more.”  ”

I affirmed myself, both as a child and an adult. I never knew there were so many unspoken words and undealt with emotions I hadn’t processed. “I’m so proud of you,” I wrote to my younger self. “You are deserving of love.” When I finished writing, I sighed with relief. All of the things I had needed space to say, I finally had it. For the first time, I felt seen. And it was all thanks to that letter. 

For others who may want to write a letter to themselves to find closure, here are a few tips. Your letter doesn’t have to be eloquent or verbose and remember that this practice is simply for you. Write whatever comes to mind, and most importantly, write from your heart.

Create a Comfortable Space 

Finding a private space where you can be alone for a while is important. The closet worked best for me, but you may find another space in your home more comfortable. Turn your phone off and set it aside, so you’re not tempted to use it to distract yourself. You may also want to play a favorite playlist or some instrumental Lofi music that relaxes your body and mind, making it easy for thoughts to flow. If you’re finding the process especially difficult, try writing only for the length of one song or playlist. 

Feel Your Emotions 

Writing to your younger self and reflecting on childhood memories can cause so many different emotions to arise, some of which you may not have words for. To help articulate what you’re feeling, I recommend the feelings wheel for identifying these emotions. Know that more than one emotion can coexist, and you are not wrong for feeling any of them. 

“ Think of emotions as information. They are a guide map for our hearts, leading us to what is broken or hurting. ”

Some of the things I felt when writing to my younger self were shame and guilt. I began to feel sorry for all she encountered. I instantly wanted to shield and protect her from things she didn’t need to experience. I also remembered how innocent she was. The sound of her laughter. What brought her joy. Her spunky personality. These feelings are normal to have. This is where true authenticity and vulnerability stem from. Think of emotions as information. They are a guide map for our hearts, leading us to what is broken or hurting. From this place, we can write. 

Have a Plan 

Before you start writing, check in with a close friend or therapist, making them aware that you may need support after you finish your letter. This can also be a practice you complete in a therapy session if you want professional guidance. 

Think about what you’ll do with this letter as well. Will you read it back? Keep it? Throw it away? You don’t have to decide immediately, and you may change your mind when you finish, but having a plan in advance can be helpful. 

Today, my letter sits in my journal on my bookshelf. I didn’t throw it out. But I don’t reread it; I don’t need to. Writing that letter felt like conquering one of my toughest battles and also like gaining closure for unresolved wounds. I’ve found freedom on the other side. It was also the catalyst for writing more consistently and overcoming that fear. I now own more journals than I can count.

Brianna Robles is a Brooklyn, NY-based lifestyle freelance writer. Her creative writing platform, Writing My Wrongs , encourages people to share their full story. When she’s not writing, you can find her performing at open mics and trying new restaurants.

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Letter to my younger self

Hey little me, 

I wish you had written down a couple of questions for me to answer today. It is hard to think what you would have wanted me to talk about specifically, since I am you and not, at the same time. My last resource is guessing. I am not sure if you ever desired advice from an older self in order to take decisions. So even though you did not wish for them, here is a couple of bits of advice: 

To the one I was 15 years ago, math is hard but learning is great. Do not feel like you need to follow what everybody else does in order to feel part of the bunch. Keep being loud and kind; you are whole independently. Continue playing with dolls despite others quitting it due to the idea of ‘being lame’. You are onto a great start. 

To the one I was 10 years ago, do not worry about boys and keep focusing on building genuine relationships with friends. It is ok you became reserved; sometimes it is better to sit back and listen. Books are awesome; you will read an entire book per week, more than you will ever do. Forget about the bullies; you will prove them wrong one day, so do not even doubt yourself for a second. You have a bright path ahead. 

To the one I was 5 years ago, failing math is not the end of the world. Friends and family will be there to help you get up. Taking baby steps towards independence will be exciting, but take mental notes. Please take a moment and try to take it all in. You are on the right track regarding what you want to do in the future. 

To the one I was yesterday, keep listening to yourself. Check those mental notes once in a while. You feel like you aged more in the last 3 months than in the last 3 years. Remember to not compare yourself to others. Nurture those old good habits that you left alone a while ago. You have your priorities straight. The road is still long, but the ride is worth it. 

Today you are looking quite different, both inside and out. You probably did not expect to turn out this way; you would be surprised but proud at the same time. I know I owe you many wishes and promises you made to yourself along the way. I know I still have to take you places you have not been before. Thus, I promise I will continue moving forward but without forgetting about you. Cheers to you: past, present, and future. 

Sincerely, 

Yours truly. 

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A Letter to My Younger Self

I’ve had a few things on my mind of late, and I’ve spent a lot of time journaling and working my way through some blocks. All this has put me in a fairly reflective mode, and I’ve been reliving the last few years in my head. I don’t mean that in a negative way though. If anything, I can feel my heart and mind expanding in ways I’ve not allowed myself for quite some time .

Going over my life almost like a movie reel in the last few days has made my heart ache for my younger self, the 18-year-old version of me. God! I was so naive then, and my world view was so limited. I had no clue then of all the ways in which my life would expand, the experiences I would have, and the lessons I would learn along the way.

So as a result of all this recent contemplation about my life’s journey to where I am today, I ended up writing this post as a letter to my younger self . It’s mostly just cathartic writing in a way, but a part of me also hopes that if you’re going through a tough phase, the words in this letter might uplift you and make you believe in your own strength.

Dear younger me ,

I know you’re dying to become a “real” adult. You know, with a job, and a salary on which you can live comfortably, and with no one to tell you what to do.

Well, that last part is a myth. No matter how “adult” you become, there will always be someone to tell you what to do. You will learn with time to ignore some of those voices, but adulthood is not the utopia you imagine it to be.

Make no mistake though – growing up, growing old, is a real privilege . The adulting (no, it’s not a word that you know of yet) might get to you every once in a while, but being able to do adulthood is something you should be grateful for every single day.

In fact, your adult life will be sweeter and harder than what you can imagine right now, but know this, you’re in for a beautiful journey.

Anyway, you won’t learn to be structured till many, many years later, so here’s an unstructured list of things that I wish you knew at the beautiful, impressionable, golden age of 18:

No seriously! Save more. You will not realise how important this is until so much later.

YOU ARE WORTH SO MUCH MORE THAN WHAT YOU THINK YOU ARE.

It will take you over a decade, and then some, to believe that. You will spend many years believing you are not good enough. You won’t even realise how much you’re tying your own worth to outside validation. Have more faith in yourself. Love yourself , all parts of you, all shapes of you. You are worth everything and more.

THERE IS MORE TO YOU THAN YOUR BODY SIZE OR WEIGHT.

Somehow in your head you’ve come to believe that you’re fat. No one’s ever said that to you but that’s how you’ve started to see yourself. Over time this will create a long-lasting block in your head. When you look back at your photos from this time, you will whack your head at how you thought THIS was fat.

You will become unbearably sensitive about your weight, to the detriment of your mental and physical health, and you will have body image issues. You will have to work very hard to unravel that block but you can do it. I wish you learned to cherish your body much sooner.

YOU WILL IGNORe YOUR INTUITION MORE OFTEN THAN YOU WILL LISTEN TO IT.

It will take you a long time to learn to trust your inner voice, but when you will finally lean into it, big, beautiful things will happen. It will seem scary in the beginning, and you will have to shake things up dramatically, but listening to your intuition will fuel a fire within you that you didn’t even realise you had all along.

I WISH YOU WOULDN’T SETTLE FOR PLAYING SMALL.

Somewhere along the way, you will start to play small. It breaks my heart that you will have to go through that phase. You will unknowingly give up your power, and it will take you a long time to even realise that, leave alone taking that back.

The journey back to your inner strength will take a while, and you will fight it in fact, because sadly, even you will not understand the depth of your own self. But once you own it, you will blossom like the gorgeous flower that you always were.

FEMALE FRIENDSHIPS FTW!

You will lose touch with some of your closest friends only to find those ties back again in a few years, and you will know then that having girlfriends that you can lean on is a blessing, and one that you must hold onto with all your might.

TRAVEL WILL BECOME A SOUL LIFTER FOR YOU.

You will find a deep sense of joy in travel. You will leave pieces of your heart in so many places.

Right now, you can’t even fathom that you will one day fly to far away lands – you’ve never even been on a flight yet! Or that you will eat foods you’ve never even dreamed of in your life and see views where you will have to pinch yourself to believe that it’s all real, and that it’s all right in front of you. But sweet girl, you will, and you will want more of it, because you will learn that travel is one of those things that truly makes your soul feel alive.

IT WILL TAKE YOU A WHILE, BUT YOU WILL LEARN TO LIVE THROUGH TOUGH TIMES WITH GRACE.

Admittedly, you will not always act or behave gracefully. In fact, there will be a phase when you will become a version of yourself that you won’t even recognise. But little by little, as you start your inner work, you will find your true self resurfacing, and along with it, your grace, empathy and confidence as well.

YOU WILL BE LOVED IN WAYS YOU CANNOT EVEN IMAGINE TODAY.

I know you’re worried about whether you’ll find true love, whether there is someone out there for you. You’re afraid of being alone even though you never really were.

Despite your worries, you will experience love. Deep, profound love that will shake you to the core. You will find joy, so much joy, that you will be afraid to believe that it can last.

So many new people will come into your lives who will love you for who you are. Your inner circle will never be too large, but the ones who make their way through it, will be solid gold. Because YOU are solid gold, darling girl.

HONOUR YOUR WORD.

Live up to your own word. Do what you say you will. Don’t say yes to things you know you won’t end up following through.

There will be a phase when you will struggle to keep your own promises to yourself – try not to beat yourself up over it. But know that the sooner you break that cycle, the happier you will feel with yourself.

AND WHILE WE’RE ON THE TOPIC OF WORDS – YOUR WORDS HAVE POWER.

Be wise in the words you use for yourself and also what you use with others. Your words have so much power – they can heal, they can uplift, but they can cut you (and others) down. Use this power wisely.

I could go on for hours, but I’ll probably end up boring you to death. So just one last bit before I sign off – laugh more, and live whole-heartedly ! You, and your life, is a gift.

Love always, Your much older self

What would you include in your letter to your younger self? What advice would you give the 18-year-old version of yourself?

Image via  The Creative Library

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19 Comments

Yes to this! If there’s one thing I always wish I could go back and tell my 18 year old self, it’s that it’s so important to love yourself. Stop seeking validation from other people or numbers on a screen. I was definitely naive too, I probably still am in some respects, haha! But it was really lovely reading this post, I love how you gave yourself something to look forward too. This is such a positive post :)

Anika | chaptersofmay.com

Thank you for your really thoughtful comment, Anika! :)

I have many years on my 18-year-old self and I am still learning to love all parts of me. It’s a process for sure.

Oh I love this! It is such a powerful letter.

Wouldn’t it be amazing to have a ‘do over’ but with the knowledge and experience we have developed over the years!

I wish I had been able to tell 18 year old me that a pension is key, saving is MEGA important and invest that money in property. On the flip though, I wish I had the self love now that I did then. Hey I had to do something backwards right?

Brilliant post x

Thank you, Claire! And absolutely yes to a do-over. :)

And totally agree with you on the saving. Despite my parents drilling it into me, somehow I didn’t learn the lesson till really late! ?‍♀️

Such powerful messages! I would tell my younger self to stop worrying things will just fall into place.

Zoey | http://www.zoeyolivia.com

Oh yes, that too. Though personally for me, I think I’ve become a big worrier as I’ve grown older. My world view, my expectations from life – they were on such a smaller scale that I didn’t know enough to be worried about. :)

Ah, this is lovely. If I could go back in time I’d tell my younger self not to settle for less and that I was worth much more than I believed I was at the time too. And yet… those experiences are what make us, so perhaps looking back, it all turned out as it was meant to be, Lisa

Absolutely. We are who we are because of how our past has shaped up – in all good ways and bad. So there is obviously a lesson in growing up. :)

This is wonderful! I would definitely tell myself to save more, not care what others think and not to worry about body size. Great post, I really enjoyed reading it!

Completely agree with you on these points. Especially not caring what others think.

I loved this post! I think the message you send here is quite powerful and meaningful. If there’s two things I would have told myself, I would have definitely said the importance of self-worth and to learn as you go as well! Great post :)

Growing up, I used to equate learning with school education. It’s only in the last few years that I’ve realised there is more to learning than what textbooks can ever teach us. And the lesson in self-worth is one that I have only really learned lately!

Some really important points here that I think every young person should know, I related to this so much looking back on previous years x

Thank you so much. Glad this resonated with you. :)

It is always great to write a letter to your younger self and reflect on how things were back then. All of us wanted to grow up so fast that we didn’t realize the reality behind it, like costs and taxes haha. I love all of these different things that you highlight. Definitely important to save money sooner. The same goes with how your whole worth is more than just what you look like. Genuine female friendships are great! So important to honor your word. I am all about being accountable. Thanks for sharing your letter!

Nancy ✨ exquisitely.me

Hahahaha! Let’s not even get started with the taxes bit. Nothing could have prepared me for the shock that I get every year when I realise how much tax I’ve paid! ?‍♀️

Glad you stopped by, and thank you for your sweet comment. :)

What a beautifully written letter to yourself lovely! There are so many things I would love to tell my younger self , I wish I could tell mine that things will be come good in the end! x

Lucy | http://www.lucymary.co.uk

Thank you so much, Lucy. Yes, things have a way of working out, don’t they, even if we can’t see the what and the how at that moment. ?

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A Letter to My Younger Self by Ally Swanson

A letter to my younger self.

The first lesson I want to teach you is that it’s okay to be sensitive. I know mom says that it’s your worst trait, but I think it makes you strong.

I’m twenty years old now, but in a lot of ways I still hold on to my ten year old self. I remember fighting so hard to reach that age. I thought if I could just get to ten, everything would change. I thought somehow things would get better. As outrageous as it sounds, it felt like reaching this age meant I was moving toward adulthood. Being ten meant not being a kid anymore, which meant not being able to have a blind innocence to the life around me anymore. When I was ten, my parents sat me down to tell me they were getting divorced. This shouldn’t have been a shock to me, but I can still remember how it felt when my throat closed and air stopped flowing from my body. I didn’t say anything to anyone for days after that. When I was ten, I was living in a shed in the back yard of where my house had burned down two years earlier. It was a step up from the hair salon where I used to sleep, but it was hardly a place you could call home. I can still remember rolling over in my sleep and finding scorpions under my blankets. When I was ten, I went to see a therapist for the first time. It was a requirement for my parents’ divorce. It was also the first time I ever told anyone why I jumped at my mother’s touch and had nightmares about the fierceness in her eyes. Being ten meant being at the crossroads of some of the most impactful life events I have experienced so far. It was my most memorable year and my most haunting nightmare.

It’s been a decade since I’ve lived those moments, but I’ve always kept them close waiting for some sense of closure. I’ve tried pushing it down. I’ve tried therapy. I’ve tried crying. The only thing I have left is writing it out. This is why I dedicate this letter to you, Ally. I hope you can find some comfort in it.

Dear (younger) Ally,

I feel sorry when I remember what it’s like to be only ten years old. I can remember how helpless it felt. I haven’t forgotten how exhausting it was to be the doll your parents would play tug of war with and how many nights you cried to yourself wishing you had a warm house to sleep in. I know how badly you wanted things to change. To be ten meant to be reliant on parents who couldn’t even take care of themselves. It meant getting in the way of my mother’s anger and making up excuses when my friends asked to come over after school. It’s hard to recognize that life isn’t supposed to be like that, especially when you’re so young. I wish I had known that it wasn’t normal. Growing up in that environment made it feel like it was just a part of life. I wish I had known that things would get better. Had I known that I would get out someday, things would have been a lot different for me. I hope this letter can offer you the support I know you don’t have. I want to show you your strength and remind you to hold on because things do change.

The first lesson I want to teach you is that it’s okay to be sensitive. I know mom says that it’s your worst trait, but I think it makes you strong. It can be difficult to be gentle with yourself, especially when no one ever shows you what love is supposed to look like. You’re either too sensitive or too hardened. It can feel like nothing comes easy, but I want to remind you that the world needs you. It takes strength to be soft in a world that seems like it’s out to get you. Things will change. You will change, but never lose your sensitivity. Not everyone in the world can sympathize with others the way you can. I hope that you find comfort in knowing that it’s your softness that makes the world a little better. A little easier.

Hold on to your softness but know when to let it go. It took a lot for me to understand that you can’t save everyone. I remember what it was like to try to be the life jacket that mom would hold to but know your limits. I know it feels like your responsibility. When mom comes home from work and she destroys everything in her path, it is not your fault. When dad pushes you in front of him to save himself, it is not your fault. It’s hard enough being ten, there’s no need for you to rest their weight on your shoulders too.

The second thing I learned is that it’s okay to have fun. I think I’ve always been taught to be independent, and with independence comes maturity. I was never allowed to be a child in all the ways I wanted. I couldn’t ask questions. I couldn’t use my imagination to take me away. I couldn’t even feel loved and nurtured by my own parents. From a very young age I was more mature than most. By the age of five, I could cook myself dinner, clean up the mess, and go to the barn to feed and clean up after the horses. Mom and dad weren’t home very much and honestly it was better that way. At the time I remember feeling proud of myself for being able to be self-sufficient in ways other people my age couldn’t be. Now, it makes me sad that I never really allowed myself to enjoy anything. I was always taking care of something else; I forgot to take care of myself.

Please remember to have fun. Dance in the kitchen while you’re making dinner. Meet your friends outside at odd hours in the night when time seems to cease and new beginnings seem possible. Pretend the floor is lava and jump around on the furniture until your legs are sore and your stomach hurts from laughing. Just please have fun. Even at ten, it’s important to remember to live. Maybe not a lot of ten year olds think about how terrible life can be sometimes, but I know you do, so remind yourself of what it means to be alive. Pretending that you’re an adult is tiring and boring. There’s no need to grow up so fast.

Lesson three might be the most important. Learn to appreciate the time you have right now, as screwed up as it might be. You will only be ten once in your life. In a lot of ways, you deserve better than you got, but hold on to the good things. It’s been ten years since I’ve been in your footsteps, and sometimes I’ll miss how it would feel to wake up at 6:00 a.m. to sit on the hay bales and watch the sunrise with my sisters. I miss spending unlimited amounts of time outdoors and never getting tired. Hold on to those moments. Soak them up. It will make the hard days easier and the good days last longer.

I think I’ve always been looking toward the next thing. I have never taken the time to enjoy the present because I’ve always been looking toward the future, wanting something more. I’m definitely not the only one that does this either. Raised in a capitalist society, we are taught that we are only as good as what we produce. I want something more for you though. I want you to know that your worth is not defined by how much money your parents don’t have or the fact that somedays you simply don’t have it in you to go to school. It’s okay to slow down. One day, you’re going to be older, and you’ll look back on when you were ten and wish that you had taken the time to be that young and invincible. Life never stops moving. As you get older, it even seems to speed up. I hope you take advantage of the time you have now. Breathe in the air a little deeper. Savor warm food a little longer. Write down conversations that make you smile. These are the moments that make everything else worth it. All you have to do is slow down and take them in.

I hope you hold space for yourself and you stop apologizing for things that are not your fault. You deserve so much better than you got, but it’s your responsibility to demand more. If you’ve taken anything away from this letter, I hope you’ve learned that. You are worthy. There will be days when you doubt this, but keep reminding yourself. You are in control and you have the power to be better than your parents. I may still be very young but trust me on this: you will not turn into them. You will demand more. You will move away from the farmlands surrounding  Houston and you will start a life for yourself in New York. You will make friends that feel like what you’ve always imagined family to be. Life may not ever get easier, but you will learn how to stand up for yourself. There are great things ahead of you, Ally. I don’t want to spoil the surprise so I’ll let you find out for yourself. Just know that you will be okay. One day you’re going to be really happy. We’re both going to be happy. Just wait and see.

—your biggest fan

Ally Swanson (BA ’22) originally wrote “A Letter to My Younger Self” in George Burns’s Fall 2020 Advanced Writing Course “ Writing About Childhood .”

Thumbnail image: “ Scorpion Ornament ” ( 6th–7th century), Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

33 Things I Would Tell My Younger Self

A Letter to My Younger Self

I know you like them words. But an introduction doesn’t work everywhere so let me get to the point .

• You will leave all this one day to write . But there is no way you can tell now so just go through this and don’t worry too much.
• You will cross someone you love now on the street later and not even say hi.
• The boy who broke your heart did you a favor . (and 13 other ideas on how to care less .)
• Books will change your life . Read, baby. Read.
• No one else is going to believe in you for you . You gotta start doing it yourself .
• People will love you for the values you’ll care about. Those who will love you for your body or money or cooking skills won’t really love you.
• You will have to give a lot more than you think you can .
• One night you will be lost on a dark highway in Thailand all alone without a phone . One day you will be in a tour van with the driver driving you to and fro between the Chile – Bolivia border but none of the countries will take you in . On a very bright day in July you will be fired from a big world bank for questioning an egocentric boss . You will not have a backup plan always but you will make one on the go and get yourself out every time .
• You will almost lose your family because you won’t marry until you are 32 . But an 80 – year – old Chilean woman known for her obnoxiousness will wait for you in her home with gallons of red wine in plastic cans .
• She will not be the only one .
• Hundreds of people will email you, message you, contact you from around the world telling how your writing helped them so never, never think you are alone.
• Constructive criticism and meaningless negative blaming are two different things . One day, y ou will be able to tell . (many more lessons in life )
• You will make many many mistakes .
• You will be so scared so many times you won’t be able to count .
• You will still be trying to understand the stars, this infinite space around us, the blue sky above, the billowing ocean ahead . You will still ask where we are, what’s all this, what’s the purpose . You will read tonnes of books . Watch videos . Write about it . You will feel sad when you wouldn’t find an obvious significance to living . But you will not be the only one searching for meaning . And in your quest, at least, you won’t be alone.
• As the doctors stitch up your knee on an obscure Indonesian island, you will sing so hard while crying, they will laugh. There is a rhythm to pain.
• You will jump whenever you’ll have to.
• It looks easy for others. It is not.
• You will hold their hands and tell them it is alright . Like you do now.
• Your favorite movie will be The Shape of Water. Why? Another being from another source of life is hope for you, not weirdness.
• You don’t know Proust now but he will become your favorite writer. I hope this letter to my younger self finds you and you read him now.
• In every human relationship, you will give more than you have to. But you don’t have to.
• You will worry more than you need to. But you don’t have to. Most of the things that matter are out of your control. ( Serendipity or choice ?)
• But you will have to walk until the turn to find the path ahead. No one else can do that for you.
• Life doesn’t get easier, it just gets different.
• One person will mean more than most of the rest combined.
• There is nothing like too much dancing.
• Art will bring love and chaos into your life. But it will be the only thing that will make sense.
• Science will continue to make everything easy and magical.
• Water can be a best friend when there is no one else. Try standing under a shower with your eyes closed and your fingers in your ears. Better. Find a beach and stand on the sand with your eyes closed. Let the cool waves roll in and wet your feet. Listen to the ocean.
• It will get so hard sometimes you would want to let go and sink in, but only for a second. You will find yourself rowing harder, running faster, and jumping higher every time you don’t think you can.
• Lists get longer and longer. Even if you can get only a little bit out, do it. A little bit done many times is better than not doing anything at all.
• You will figure out what’s important in life . Just let yourself be.

Now tear apart this letter because you will get to live every moment. It doesn’t get any better.

Pair This Letter With Life lessons to excel in your 30s and Lessons Learned in 2022

Did you like the advice for my younger self? What advice would you give your younger self? Tell me in the comments.

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2 thoughts on “33 Things I Would Tell My Younger Self”

Now tear apart this letter because you will get to live every moment. It doesn’t get any better.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts. I agree with many things. After reading your letter, I was inspired to take a pen and paper and write a short essay, so to speak, my personal message to my 20-year-old self. Although I am an essay writer and paperwork is a regular thing for me, it made me feel very nostalgic and put a smile on my face. Thank you for the encouragement!

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Loveful Mind

An Open Letter To My Younger Self

If only I knew then what I know now, I would have saved myself from so much wasted anxiety and so much unnecessary stress .

And in five years from now, I would say the exact same thing to my present self today.

Here is an open letter to remind my younger self that life has its own peculiar ways of throwing us headfirst into a current of deep water. But the waves will never be dangerous enough to drown us because we are much, much stronger than what we give ourselves credit for.

To my younger self, I hope you know that the trials and tribulations you are being tested for are trivial in the grander scheme of things. I hope you know that the uphill battles you are currently fighting seem harder with every step and the slope seems to be unforgiving, but know that you are so close to reaching its peak and basking in the glory of the Sun atop the mountains. Know this because I have reached the top and I have seen the Sun. I have been kissed by its warm rays, and I know how difficult it seems not knowing how much further you have to go.

To my younger self, I hope you know that heartache isn’t forever, nor will this be the last of it. Heartache is like a cloak draping over our heavy shoulders, one which we must learn to shed when it has taught us the lessons we need to grow. Heartache is how we know there are real things in this world; things that are so beautiful and raw and so close to our heart that it leaves a scar so deep when it leaves us. If it doesn’t hurt, then it isn’t real, and in a world where there are so many glossy and superficial mannequins of people and products, we know how genuine gems are so rare to find and hard to come by.

To my younger self, when you feel that life is choking the patience out of you in wanting all too much, all too soon, let this serve as a reminder that there will never be a day where you are fully content with everything that is happening. We are all wired to want what we don’t have, to chase what isn’t ours and to always look towards what is missing. When you feel lost or confused or wishing for the things you are lacking, let me remind you that you are on the right track and you have everything you need to be happy, you just need to find it within yourself to accept these things.

To my younger self, who is crippled with fear and doubt and uncertainty, know that life is only going to get better from here. When you’re in my position, looking back, you’ll question why it had to take hindsight to appreciate everything I had and how I had it so good, yet didn’t have the eyes to realise that. Trust me when I say that the doubt you feel now is not going to get any better with age, or time, or by conquering achievements — that they will increase tenfold to be bigger and more fearful than ever if you let them be. Which is why you need to eliminate these doubts now. Stop questioning yourself and start believing. You need to equip yourself well for what’s to come. Nothing ever gets easier; your armour only grows thicker with time and your weapons only sharpen with continued conditioning.

To my younger self, know that everything will be okay because I am here telling you so. Know that every day is the best thing that can happen to you, and things are unfolding in their own miraculous way in the right direction. Know this and believe this because I am proof that you’ve made it out alive on the other side.

Ellen Nguyen

• Ellen Nguyen https://lovefulmind.com/posts/author/ellennguyenofficial/ Rewire Your Brain to Transform from Self-Doubt to Dream Life
• Ellen Nguyen https://lovefulmind.com/posts/author/ellennguyenofficial/ 6 Tips on How to be confident as an introvert
• Ellen Nguyen https://lovefulmind.com/posts/author/ellennguyenofficial/ How My Husband Knew I Was a Woman Worth Pursuing
• Ellen Nguyen https://lovefulmind.com/posts/author/ellennguyenofficial/ Do You Value Your Attention and Use it to Your Advantage in Dating? Here’s How.

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A Purpose In Pain

Finding meaning and beauty in life's obstacles

A Letter To My Younger Self

July 1, 2020

Dear younger me,

There are so many things I want to tell you, it’s hard to know where to start. Life can be so beautiful, and at the same time, so hard. But you are strong enough to get through it all. I’ll begin with this one simple plea:

Don’t grow up too fast.

Slow down and be patient. You have so much life left to live. There is so much that God has planned for you. But right now, enjoy this time in your life. Enjoy having your health and vitality, because you will not have these things forever.

Never waste a second wishing you were older or somewhere else in life. Treasure this time because it goes by too quickly. You will see and experience things that will urge you to grow up too fast; don’t let them. Cherish this time in your life and live every second as fully as you can.

Dear younger me, you are worth so much more than you think you are.

This is something you will struggle with. You will think you’re not good enough but I promise you are. You are so much more than enough. Stop looking to others to find your worth. Learn to love who you are and let that be enough. Know that you are God’s beautiful creation and nothing you achieve in life or fail to achieve will ever change His love for you.

Learn to give yourself grace. I know that you set high expectations for yourself, but please, give yourself a break sometimes. You do not have to be perfect . Perfect is an illusion.

Learn to talk to yourself like you would an old friend. Be kind and gentle with the words you tell yourself. The words you speak to yourself become what you believe. Choose your words carefully.

Dear younger me, try to stop worrying so much.

I promise you the majority of things you’re worried about will never actually happen. Stop wasting your precious time on the what-ifs. If you keep focusing on what could happen in the future or ruminating on things you can’t change from the past, you will miss out on the gift that is here in this moment.

Don’t look back in 20 years and regret that you never learned to appreciate today. There is something to be said for practicing mindfulness. Learn to embrace the present moment.

Dear younger me, hug your grandparents a little tighter.

Soak up every little moment you have with them. Call them, write them letters, let them know how loved and treasured they are. You will not have them forever. Make the most of your time together.

Hug your parents too. Thank them for all the sacrifices they’ve made for you. They love you more than you know and have given you a life that so many others would love to have. Tell them how much you love them as often as you can.

Dear younger me, be grateful for all you have.

Never stop searching for the blessings all around you. If you learn to look, you will find them everywhere. Be grateful for all you’ve been given . Realize the abundance of blessings that surround you.

Be thankful for the people in your life who love and support you. Let them know how much they mean to you. Nurture the relationships in your life. Relationships take work. Strive to always give more than you take from them.

Dear younger me, stop caring so much what everyone thinks about you.

Eleanor Roosevelt said, “you wouldn’t worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do.” There is so much truth in this statement. Remember it. Stop living for the approval of others. You will never be able to please everyone.

There will be people in this life who don’t like you. Learn to accept this and move on. Find the people in this world who do appreciate the fire burning inside your heart. Find them and love them hard.

Learn to forgive quickly, but don’t let anyone walk all over you. Stand up for yourself. Stand up for what you believe in. Believe that there is goodness in this world and make it your life’s mission to seek out and find this goodness.

Dear younger me, stop letting your fear hold you back.

You have wrestled with fear your entire life. Don’t let it win. Choose faith instead of fear. Know that wherever you go, God will go with you. You are never alone.

Don’t let your fear hold you back from living your life and stepping out boldly into the world. You have so many gifts to give; do not let fear prevent you from sharing these gifts with the world.

Dear younger me, don’t let pain harden your heart.

Instead, use your pain for good. Know that it serves a great purpose. Learn from the difficult times in your life . Never stop learning. Let your pain give you a wisdom that you would not otherwise have.

When you go through difficult times, don’t hide your pain and become closed off to others. Learn to share your truth and use your story to help others to feel less alone in theirs. If you do this, you will never waste your pain.

Dear younger me, you can do hard things.

There will be times in life that are hard. But you are so much stronger than you know. You are more resilient and wiser than you know. Don’t ever forget this. There will be times when life will try to wear you down. Don’t let it. There will be times when life will be messy and unpredictable and you will question it all.

But know that God has great plans for you. You will do amazing things in this life. Believe in yourself. This life is so beautiful. Never stop searching for the beauty in this world. And never stop believing that you can change this world. You can make a difference in the lives of others. Trust in yourself, trust in God, and know that you can make it through anything.

Your future self

P.S. When you meet that dark-haired guy that winks at you from across the party, don’t let him go. He will love you fiercely, in sickness and in health. He will love you through the good times and the bad and will make you see all the beauty that you possess. He is a good, good man. The kind of man your father knows that you deserve, the kind he would choose for you if he could. Choose him and don’t ever let him go. He will be one of the greatest gifts that you will ever receive.

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Share this:

July 1, 2020 at 11:18 am

I love it❤️ It’s absolutely true. I would left very similar letter for my younger me.

July 1, 2020 at 2:23 pm

So glad you liked this!

July 1, 2020 at 11:30 am

Such a stunning piece of writing. The hug your grandparents tighter part really hit me. So many things that are relevant to when I was younger. Thank you for sharing this!

July 1, 2020 at 2:24 pm

Thank you so much!

July 1, 2020 at 1:23 pm

So beautifully written as always, Sam! I love what you said about how we believe the things we think about ourselves. It’s a lesson I’m still learning now that I wish I had learned years ago!

It’s so true. The words we speak to ourselves are so powerful. I’m a work in progress with trying to speak to myself more kindly!

July 1, 2020 at 1:54 pm

Love this ❤️ Such encouraging words and so much truth. “Don’t let pain harden your heart”- one of my favorites.

July 1, 2020 at 2:25 pm

Thank you, Lori!

July 1, 2020 at 3:14 pm

I definitely could have used most of these lessons growing up. Those were hard years for me! But at least we know now 🙂

July 3, 2020 at 3:44 pm

Me too, Jennifer. But we are so much wiser now 😊

July 1, 2020 at 3:54 pm

This was so beautiful and really cute! I feel like I can take in many of these messages. “Dear younger me, don’t let pain harden your heart,” was the one that really resonated with me right now. There is so much value in softening.

July 3, 2020 at 3:43 pm

Thank you! I’m glad this resonated with you.

July 1, 2020 at 9:34 pm

I can tell you as a much older me this is on point. It only took me about 55 years to get comfortable in my own skin. Life is short. Live it to the fullest❤️.

July 3, 2020 at 3:41 pm

Glad you could relate to this. Also so glad to hear that you’re finally comfortable in your own skin, you deserve that ❤️

July 2, 2020 at 5:23 am

I love it! This is beautifully written!

July 3, 2020 at 3:40 pm

July 2, 2020 at 11:20 am

Hi, These are so true and at some point, in our 30’s we always think about what we could have done when we were younger! Don’t grow up too fast is my favorite and I wish I would always stay 18. -Nandita http://www.nanditasampat.com/blog

July 2, 2020 at 2:06 pm

This is so sweet, I love it ❤️

Thank you for reading!

July 3, 2020 at 3:07 pm

Such a beautiful post. I could relate so well to it. I actually wish someone had told my younger self all these.

July 3, 2020 at 3:39 pm

Thank you! So glad you could relate.

July 3, 2020 at 4:00 pm

My younger self so needed to hear this, Sam. Thankyou so much for penning this down in such a beautiful way. Sending so much love and light.

July 3, 2020 at 4:43 pm

Thank you so much for reading. I’m glad it resonated with you!

July 3, 2020 at 4:11 pm

This is very creative. I remember writing letters to my future self, but I’ve never written one to my past self.

July 3, 2020 at 6:24 pm

Thank you, Grace.

July 3, 2020 at 6:13 pm

Samantha, this is such a beautiful post. I couldn’t agree more with every single point made, especially to stop worrying. With that being said, I think we need to remind our present selves these things too! Thanks for the great read! Sincerely, BL

July 3, 2020 at 6:20 pm

Thank you so much, I’m glad this resonated with you. And my present self most definitely needs these reminders as well!

July 3, 2020 at 7:50 pm

This is such a beautifully written, heartfelt post. It made my heart smile. Thank you for sharing.

July 3, 2020 at 8:14 pm

Oh I’m so glad to hear that. Thank you for reading!

July 4, 2020 at 1:00 am

Beautiful – don’t you wish we could really do this? Age gives us the wisdom we could have used in our youth! But also, would we heed our own advice? Maybe we’re meant to learn the lessons on our own to arrive right where we are.

July 5, 2020 at 2:55 pm

Yes I wish I could really go back and talk to my younger self but maybe you’re right, everything happens just as it’s supposed to!

July 4, 2020 at 3:18 am

The ones that touched my heart and were very relatable was not growing up too fast and to hug my grandparents tighter. My grandparents live all live in Ghana and they all passed away really quickly and I don’t really remember the last time I verbally told them I loved them. Ever since I was young, I always wanted to be older and on my own and a big girl in the real world by myself, now I’m at the point where I wish I was a kid again to enjoy all of the moments where there was no bills or responsibilities. Thank you for sharing xxx

July 5, 2020 at 2:57 pm

I wish I could hug my grandparents again, and I’m sure you do too. And if only we knew to slow down and not wish to grow up so fast when we were younger. Thank you for reading and sharing your thoughts!

July 5, 2020 at 1:14 pm

Love this! It is so true!

So glad you enjoyed it! Thanks for reading.

July 5, 2020 at 1:28 pm

I love this post and the spirit of what you’re sharing here. Thank you. 🌸

I’m so glad you liked it. Thank you for reading!

July 5, 2020 at 3:47 pm

Beautiful! I can totally relate to “choose faith over fear” and it is something that I would definitely say to my younger self. 🙂 Loved the postscript too! 🙂

July 7, 2020 at 5:44 pm

July 6, 2020 at 3:26 pm

This is really beautiful!

July 7, 2020 at 5:41 pm

July 13, 2020 at 4:07 pm

Took me forever to learn how to give myself grace. Comparison was always my “default” and it wasn’t until my 30s I realized we are on different journeys and loving who I am and how I grow on my journey is the most remarkable feeling I could have. Thank you for this inspiring read

July 16, 2020 at 7:12 pm

This is beautiful Samantha, thank you! A reminder to be kind to ourselves and grateful for all that we have ❤️

July 16, 2020 at 9:18 pm

Thank you Stephanie!

July 24, 2020 at 4:36 pm

I have a list of things I would like to tell my younger self too. Thank you so much for an interesting read

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Writing a Letter to Your Future Self: Benefits, Guide, and Template

Writing a letter to our future selves is a simple yet profound practice that has the power to transform our lives.

 This act of self-expression serves as a conduit to our innermost thoughts, allowing us to capture our hopes, fears, and desires in a tangible form. By embarking on this journey of self-reflection, we open ourselves up to the possibility of profound personal growth and positive change. In this article, we delve into the remarkable impact of writing a letter to your future self and explore how this practice can shape the trajectory of your life.

3 Reasons to Write a Letter to Your Future Self: Benefits

1. reflection and self-awareness.

Writing a letter to your future self provides a unique opportunity for reflection and self-awareness. By capturing your current thoughts, emotions, and experiences, you gain insight into who you are at this moment in time. This act of self-reflection allows you to understand your desires, fears, and motivations, enabling you to navigate your life with greater clarity and purpose.

2. Goal Setting and Intentions

One of the remarkable benefits of writing a letter to your future self is the ability to set clear goals and intentions. As you pen your thoughts, dreams, and aspirations, you articulate your vision for the future. This goal-setting process helps you identify what truly matters to you and creates a roadmap for achieving your desired outcomes. The act of writing down your goals significantly increases your commitment to them, making you more likely to take the necessary steps to turn them into reality.

3. Personal Growth and Transformation

Revisiting the letter to your future self allows you to witness your personal growth and transformation over time. Months or even years later, as you open the letter, you gain a fresh perspective on your past self. You can celebrate the progress you've made, acknowledge the challenges you've overcome, and recognize the person you've become. This powerful reminder of your resilience and personal evolution serves as motivation to continue growing and striving toward your dreams.

How to Write a Letter to Your Future Self

Choose a meaningful timeframe.

Select a timeframe for your letter that aligns with your goals. You may opt for a year, five years, or even a decade into the future. Consider both long-term and short-term perspectives to capture different aspects of your life journey.

Find a Quiet and Inspiring Environment

Create a calm and distraction-free space for writing your letter. Find a place that inspires you and allows your thoughts to flow freely. Consider incorporating elements such as soothing music, scented candles, or natural surroundings to enhance your creativity and introspection.

Reflect on Your Current State

Take the time to reflect on your current thoughts, feelings, and experiences. Explore your strengths, weaknesses, and areas for growth. Use this opportunity to gain clarity about what you want to achieve and the person you want to become.

Set Clear Goals and Intentions

Define specific goals and aspirations in your letter. Be clear about what you want to accomplish and the steps you plan to take to achieve them. Write down your intentions with conviction, and visualize the future you desire.

Express Your Emotions and Dreams

Let your emotions flow onto the paper. Be authentic and vulnerable as you share your hopes, fears, and dreams. Use this letter as a safe space to express yourself fully and honestly.

In the TED video below, Meg Jay shares the essential questions to ask your future self thus enabling your present and future to align so you can start achieving your goals.

Use the ‘GROW’ Template for Writing To Your Future Self

G - Gratitude and Reflection

R - Realizations and Lessons Learned

O - Outlook and Aspirations

W - Wishes and Dreams

Now let's break down each step of the acronym:

G - Gratitude and Reflection:

Express gratitude for the experiences, people, and opportunities that have shaped your life. Reflect on the positive aspects and milestones you have achieved. Acknowledge the blessings and lessons you have received along the way.

R - Realizations and Lessons Learned:

Share the realizations you have had about yourself, others, and the world around you. Reflect on the lessons you have learned from various experiences and challenges. Discuss how these insights have impacted your growth and understanding.

O - Outlook and Aspirations:

Describe your current outlook on life and the future. Share your aspirations and goals for personal and professional development. Discuss the vision you have for yourself and the steps you plan to take to achieve it.

W - Wishes and Dreams:

Articulate your wishes and dreams for the future. Share the things you hope to experience, the places you want to visit, or the achievements you aspire to. Express your deepest desires and the possibilities you envision for yourself.

By following the "GROW" acronym, you can structure your letter to your future self, covering gratitude and reflection, realizations and lessons learned, outlook and aspirations, as well as wishes and dreams. This framework allows you to reflect on your journey, express your aspirations, and inspire your future self.

Revisiting Your Letter

Timing and frequency.

Decide when and how often you will open the letter to your future self. Give yourself enough time to grow and experience life before revisiting it. Some choose to open it on a specific date or milestone, while others prefer to keep it sealed for several years.

Reflection and Assessment

As you read your letter, reflect on the goals and intentions you set. Assess your progress, achievements, and the lessons you have learned along the way. Celebrate your successes and use any setbacks as opportunities for growth and course correction.

Adjusting and Realigning

Based on your newfound insights, make adjustments and realign your path as needed. Goals may change, and priorities may shift over time. Use the letter as a guide to navigate your journey and stay connected to your authentic self.

Writing a letter to your future self is a powerful practice that invites self-reflection, goal-setting, and personal growth. It allows you to capture the essence of who you are today and provides a glimpse into the person you aspire to become. Embrace this transformative journey of self-discovery, and let the act of writing guide you toward a future filled with purpose, fulfillment, and growth. So take some time to sit down and put pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard, and send a message to the person you hope to become.

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Write a Letter to Your Younger Self

Send us your letter to your younger self.

Writing a letter to your younger self can be a cathartic and extremely thought provoking experience. Do you have wisdom now that you wish you had back then?

Have a go at reflecting and putting your thoughts to paper in this creative exercise for u3a members.

Write a letter to send back through time, to a past version of yourself - what do you want to say to this person? What experiences and hindsight will you share? What advice do you give them?

A selection of members' letters, or extracts from them, will be shared on our website for members across the movement to read. Your letter can be anonymous or credited, whatever you prefer.   

Richard Peoples, u3a Subject Adviser for Book Groups , has suggested:

'In writing to your younger self you may want to reflect on one or more of the important things in life, such as love life and family, education and career, or you may want to give your younger self advice around something specific – like being more confident and worrying less about the small things.'

Your letter can be as short as you like and up to 1500 words. We advise you to focus on one or two areas that you think your younger self would benefit from, rather than a full biography.

Trust volunteers will be involved in organising and handling submissions, of which some will be displayed on the u3a website. 

When you are ready, you will need to fill in an online form to share your story.

Members have submitted letters to their younger selves, up to 1500 words. Have a read and submit your own letter to be added to the collection. 

Dear Rose...

"Be brave – speak out, have an opinion, make suggestions – you will be amazed how well that will be received."

Dear Bill...

"What about the ‘golden fish’ you found in shale on the pit bank? How did it get in there? Pity it went rusty soon after."

Dear my younger self...

I hesitated before starting this letter – the last thing I want to do is come over all preachy. (I know you won’t like that.)

Dear Karen...

"I am writing to you or is it me, just to let you know that life is wonderful and yet tragic on occasions but YOU/ME are stronger than we think we are..."

'Well, in this case, I really do hope so, because changes in the way you think and act now, will hopefully lead to significant reductions in the levels of anxiety and depression we’ll otherwise experience as we live through our middle years.'

"I do understand why in later life you continued this caring and rescuing of those around you. But remember you have needs - you have the right to your freedom..."

"The view from the bedroom window at Greengarth gives a glimpse of the Solway and the Irish Sea. Some days we could just make out a smudge on the horizon that is the Isle of Man, so faint it may be imagination."

"Don't be afraid to try new things, but always remember you are in charge of yourself and you don't have to follow anyone else."

Dear Heather...

"That’s how you lived your life from then on and I admire you for it. It didn’t make you popular, but self respect trumps popularity every time."

"So, write as much as you can, read books you enjoy (more rewarding than those scheme reading novels forced on us all at school), get a good grasp of a wide range of historical eras and civilisations, keep on listening to rock music, and go to as many concerts as you can."

 "In the end I think that the adversity in your early life makes you a stronger person – though at the moment you feel very weak."

" Fail, but keep on trying and fail better.  Most of all… be kind and listen to people. What goes around comes around. Enjoy the ride..."

Dear Jennifer...

"Being creative in my retirement has kept me sane and given my mind an avenue to temporarily escape the unexpected stresses in life, which are still here, of course."

Dear Roger...

"Push at every open door. Don't go through doors that slam behind you."

Dear Kooi Chock...

"To prepare myself to be a public speaker for my job I made myself sing in the evenings in karaoke in front of large audiences. It conquered my fear of presenting my projects at work. Of course, knowledge helped and that gave me the confidence, too."

"Don’t be ashamed of your worn shoes and tight clothes. One day you will be able to buy your own things and these uncomfortable times will be forgotten. Be proud. Be patient. Be yourself."

" Grand children are the most precious beings in grandparents' lives."

Dear Adele...

"There will be times in the future when you become invisible and undervalued – but stick to your underlying principles and you will get through them..."

Dear Pauline...

" So I would urge you, my younger self, not to take the support of good friends for granted. To be non-judgemental, and accepting of those whose opinions or views you do not share ..."

Dear Lisa...

"For me, in retirement is the time to fill in the gaps of art, music and subjects that interest me."

Dear Simon...

"There’s an acronym used in the early years of the new millennium – yes, you will live that long: FOMO. You are driven by fear of missing out."

Dear Moz...

"Having a disability has always made us aware of our limitations and apprehensive about how we will cope with the years ahead. Be reassured that you have coped way beyond our expectations with mobility issues..."

Dear Carol...

"Expressionism"

Dear Den...

"Let me tell you, that you will become a Quaker and champion peace and read her story from a lectern."

Dear Marion...

"There is always something new to appreciate, and something new to learn..."

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Charles Eisenstein

Letter to my Younger Self

June 3, 2015 by Charles Eisenstein

Earlier this year Erick Joseph filmed me in a short interview “for a younger audience.” We talked about stuff I wished I’d known when I was 20. We also talked about yoga. Anyway, here is the short film he made from the interview. I also wrote a short essay to accompany it, which I’ll paste in below.

Letter to my Younger Self Dear self. Your secret, lonely knowledge is true. Despite all you have been told, the world that has been offered to you as normal is anything but normal. It is a pale semblance of the intimacy, connection, authenticity, community, joy and grief that lie just beneath the surface of society’s habits and routines.

Dear self: You have a magnificent contribution to make to the more beautiful world your heart knows is possible. It may not make you famous, but you have an important gift, an indispensable gift, and it demands you to apply it to something you care about. Unless you do, you will feel like you aren’t really living your life. You will live the life someone pays you to live, caring about things you are paid to care about. You can make a different choice.

Dear self: Do not believe the cynical voice, masquerading as the realistic voice, that says that nothing much can change. That voice will call your dreams by many names: naïve, unrealistic, immature, and irresponsible. Trust your knowledge that the world can be different, can be better. You needn’t sell out and live a life complicit in maintaining the status quo.

Dear self: You carry a deep yearning to contribute to the healing of the world and fulfillment of its possibilities. This is your deepest desire, and if you abandon it you will feel like a ghost inhabiting the mere shell of a life. Instead, trust that desire and follow it toward whatever service it calls you to, however small and insignificant it might seem.

Dear self: The most reliable guide to choice is to follow whatever makes you feel happy and excited to get out of bed in the morning. Life is not supposed to be a grim slog of discipline and sacrifice. You practiced for such a life in school, tearing yourself out of bed for days of tedium, bribed with trivial rewards called grades, intimidated by artificial consequences, proceeding through a curriculum designed by faraway authorities, asking permission to use the toilet. It is time to undo those habits. Let your compass instead be joy, love, and whatever makes you feel alive.

Dear self: When you follow your passion and come fully alive, your choices will feel threatening to anyone who abides in the dominant story of normal. You will be reminding them of the path they didn’t follow, and awaken in them the suppressed yearning to devote their gifts to something beautiful. Rather than face that grief, they may suppress it – and suppress you as well.

Dear self: At a certain moment it will become necessary for you to go on a journey. It isn’t to escape forever. It is to find yourself outside of whomever your conditioning trained you to be. You must put yourself in a situation where you don’t know who you are anymore. This is called an initiation. Who you were becomes inoperative; then, who you will be can emerge.

Dear self: Powerful forces will attempt to make you conform to society’s normality. These will take the form of social pressure, parental pressure, and very likely, economic pressure. When you encounter them, please understand that they are giving you the opportunity to define yourself. When push comes to shove, who are you?

Dear self: The old maps do not apply in these times of transition. Even if you try to follow them, even if you accept their bribes and heed their threats, there is no guarantee you’ll reap the promised rewards. The university graduates washing dishes and the Ph.D.’s driving taxis attest to this. We are entering new territory. Trust your guidance. It is OK to make mistakes, because in uncharted territory, even the wrong path is part of finding the right path.

Dear self: On this path, you are sure to get lost. But you are held, watched, and guided by a vast organic intelligence. It will become visible when things fall apart – as surely they must, in the transition between worlds. You will stumble, only to find overlooked treasure beneath your feet. You’ll despair of finding the answer – and then the answer will find you. Breakdown clears the space for synchronicity, for help unimagined and unearned.

Dear self: None of this advice can be sustainably implemented by a heroic effort on your part. You need help. Seek out other people who reinforce your perception that a more beautiful world is possible, and that life’s first priority is not security, but rather to give of your gifts, to play, to love and be loved, to learn, to explore. When those people (your tribe) are in crisis, you can hold them in the knowing of what you know. And they can do the same for you. No one can do this alone.

Reader Interactions

December 15, 2017 at 8:37 pm

So beautiful and so needed for me right now. Thank you.

April 23, 2019 at 5:24 am

PARADOX is the most beautiful word to me.

I was just relishing Charles` Letter to Self and resonating at every single point – my very Being lifted, soared at how `he gets it`.

THEN I came to the end and my heart has sunk. At the end he states categorically that you can`t do this alone. And that is where PARADOX yet again hits me. My whole experience of my life is exactly that I have been deep down alone – not lacking in company if I wanted it but that company not resonating with Who I Am. So I don`t want that company.

I am alone. And yet Charles insist I can do it alone.

I see PARADOX like an oyster and how that grit of duality, the struggle of being 100% physical and 100% `spiritual` (and yep I do realise that that is impossible as there cannot be 200% but that right there is the paradox because I experience myself as 100% of each!) – hold the truth, the pearl. And the oyster is the hardened shell of physical,ego based life protecting the 100% heart of the matter of life itself – and both are necessary, both are who I am.

This is the extract, the end of the Letter to Self that says I fall back on the sword of despair:

None of this advice can be sustainably implemented by a heroic effort on your part. You need help. Seek out other people who reinforce your perception that a more beautiful world is possible, and that life’s first priority is not security, but rather to give of your gifts, to play, to love and be loved, to learn, to explore.

When those people (your tribe) are in crisis, you can hold them in the knowing of what you know. And they can do the same for you. No one can do this alone. ———————-

That the end of that then!

July 20, 2019 at 4:01 pm

Thank you for putting words to the feelings that some of my learning experiences have brought me. “Losing” oneself and “finding” oneself can often be painful, ego-deflating and just plain scary! But kind souls along the way have tried to help me learn self-awareness and to find my own courage. I have watched and read your work for years Charles, and I have often wondered how your path came to be what it is. Life can be funny if we let it be, yes?

August 14, 2021 at 6:43 pm

Hi, Charles.

Thanks for this letter to your younger self. It resonated with me and was very helpful.

I just wanted to let you know that Erick Joseph’s film is not accessible. It is marked as private on YouTube.

Best wishes, Jonson

The Coronation

For years, normality has been stretched nearly to its breaking point, a rope pulled tighter and tighter, waiting for a nip of the black swan’s beak to snap it in two. Now that the rope has snapped, do we tie its ends back together, or shall we undo its dangling braids still further, to see what we might weave from them?

Covid-19 is showing us that when humanity is united in common cause, phenomenally rapid change is possible. None of the world’s problems are technically difficult to solve; they originate in human disagreement. In coherency, humanity’s creative powers are boundless. A few months ago, a proposal to halt commercial air travel would have seemed preposterous. Likewise for the radical changes we are making in our social behavior, economy, and the role of government in our lives. Covid demonstrates the power of our collective will when we agree on what is important. What else might we achieve, in coherency? What do we want to achieve, and what world shall we create? That is always the next question when anyone awakens to their power.

Covid-19 is like a rehab intervention that breaks the addictive hold of normality. To interrupt a habit is to make it visible; it is to turn it from a compulsion to a choice. When the crisis subsides, we might have occasion to ask whether we want to return to normal, or whether there might be something we’ve seen during this break in the routines that we want to bring into the future. We might ask, after so many have lost their jobs, whether all of them are the jobs the world most needs, and whether our labor and creativity would be better applied elsewhere. We might ask, having done without it for a while, whether we really need so much air travel, Disneyworld vacations, or trade shows. What parts of the economy will we want to restore, and what parts might we choose to let go of? And on a darker note, what among the things that are being taken away right now – civil liberties, freedom of assembly, sovereignty over our bodies, in-person gatherings, hugs, handshakes, and public life – might we need to exert intentional political and personal will to restore?

For most of my life, I have had the feeling that humanity was nearing a crossroads. Always, the crisis, the collapse, the break was imminent, just around the bend, but it didn’t come and it didn’t come. Imagine walking a road, and up ahead you see it, you see the crossroads. It’s just over the hill, around the bend, past the woods. Cresting the hill, you see you were mistaken, it was a mirage, it was farther away than you thought. You keep walking. Sometimes it comes into view, sometimes it disappears from sight and it seems like this road goes on forever. Maybe there isn’t a crossroads. No, there it is again! Always it is almost here. Never is it here.

Now, all of a sudden, we go around a bend and here it is. We stop, hardly able to believe that now it is happening, hardly able to believe, after years of confinement to the road of our predecessors, that now we finally have a choice. We are right to stop, stunned at the newness of our situation. Because of the hundred paths that radiate out in front of us, some lead in the same direction we’ve already been headed. Some lead to hell on earth. And some lead to a world more healed and more beautiful than we ever dared believe to be possible.

I write these words with the aim of standing here with you – bewildered, scared maybe, yet also with a sense of new possibility – at this point of diverging paths. Let us gaze down some of them and see where they lead.

I heard this story last week from a friend. She was in a grocery store and saw a woman sobbing in the aisle. Flouting social distancing rules, she went to the woman and gave her a hug. “Thank you,” the woman said, “that is the first time anyone has hugged me for ten days.”

Going without hugs for a few weeks seems a small price to pay if it will stem an epidemic that could take millions of lives. There is a strong argument for social distancing in the near term: to prevent a sudden surge of Covid cases from overwhelming the medical system. I would like to put that argument in a larger context, especially as we look to the long term. Lest we institutionalize distancing and reengineer society around it, let us be aware of what choice we are making and why.

The same goes for the other changes happening around the coronavirus epidemic. Some commentators have observed how it plays neatly into an agenda of totalitarian control. A frightened public accepts abridgments of civil liberties that are otherwise hard to justify, such as the tracking of everyone’s movements at all times, forcible medical treatment, involuntary quarantine, restrictions on travel and the freedom of assembly, censorship of what the authorities deem to be disinformation, suspension of habeas corpus, and military policing of civilians. Many of these were underway before Covid-19; since its advent, they have been irresistible. The same goes for the automation of commerce; the transition from participation in sports and entertainment to remote viewing; the migration of life from public to private spaces; the transition away from place-based schools toward online education, the decline of brick-and-mortar stores, and the movement of human work and leisure onto screens. Covid-19 is accelerating preexisting trends, political, economic, and social.

While all the above are, in the short term, justified on the grounds of flattening the curve (the epidemiological growth curve), we are also hearing a lot about a “new normal”; that is to say, the changes may not be temporary at all. Since the threat of infectious disease, like the threat of terrorism, never goes away, control measures can easily become permanent. If we were going in this direction anyway, the current justification must be part of a deeper impulse. I will analyze this impulse in two parts: the reflex of control, and the war on death. Thus understood, an initiatory opportunity emerges, one that we are seeing already in the form of the solidarity, compassion, and care that Covid-19 has inspired.

The Reflex of Control

At the current writing, official statistics say that about 25,000 people have died from Covid-19. By the time it runs its course, the death toll could be ten times or a hundred times bigger, or even, if the most alarming guesses are right, a thousand times bigger. Each one of these people has loved ones, family and friends. Compassion and conscience call us to do what we can to avert unnecessary tragedy. This is personal for me: my own infinitely dear but frail mother is among the most vulnerable to a disease that kills mostly the aged and the infirm.

What will the final numbers be? That question is impossible to answer at the time of this writing. Early reports were alarming; for weeks the official number from Wuhan, circulated endlessly in the media, was a shocking 3.4%. That, coupled with its highly contagious nature, pointed to tens of millions of deaths worldwide, or even as many as 100 million. More recently, estimates have plunged as it has become apparent that most cases are mild or asymptomatic. Since testing has been skewed towards the seriously ill, the death rate has looked artificially high. In South Korea, where hundreds of thousands of people with mild symptoms have been tested, the reported case fatality rate is around 1%. In Germany , whose testing also extends to many with mild symptoms, the fatality rate is 0.4%. A recent paper in the journal Science argues that 86% of infections have been undocumented, which points to a much lower mortality rate than the current case fatality rate would indicate.

The story of the Diamond Princess cruise ship bolsters this view. Of the 3,711 people on board, about 20% have tested positive for the virus; less than half of those had symptoms, and eight have died. A cruise ship is a perfect setting for contagion, and there was plenty of time for the virus to spread on board before anyone did anything about it, yet only a fifth were infected. Furthermore, the cruise ship’s population was heavily skewed (as are most cruise ships) toward the elderly : nearly a third of the passengers were over age 70, and more than half were over age 60. A research team concluded from the large number of asymptomatic cases that the true fatality rate in China is around 0.5%. That is still five times higher than flu. Based on the above (and adjusting for much younger demographics in Africa and South and Southeast Asia) my guess is about 200,000-300,000 deaths in the US – more if the medical system is overwhelmed, less if infections are spread out over time – and 3 million globally. Those are serious numbers. Not since the Hong Kong Flu pandemic of 1968/9 has the world experienced anything like it.

My guesses could easily be off by an order of magnitude. Every day the media reports the total number of Covid-19 cases, but no one has any idea what the true number is, because only a tiny proportion of the population has been tested. If tens of millions have the virus, asymptomatically, we would not know it. Further complicating the matter is the high rate of false positives for existing testing, possibly as high as 80%. (And see here for even more alarming uncertainties about test accuracy.) Let me repeat: no one knows what is really happening, including me. Let us be aware of two contradictory tendencies in human affairs. The first is the tendency for hysteria to feed on itself, to exclude data points that don’t play into the fear, and to create the world in its image. The second is denial, the irrational rejection of information that might disrupt normalcy and comfort. As Daniel Schmactenberger asks , How do you know what you believe is true?

In the face of the uncertainty, I’d like to make a prediction: The crisis will play out so that we never will know. If the final death tally, which will itself be the subject of dispute, is lower than feared, some will say that is because the controls worked. Others will say it is because the disease wasn’t as dangerous as we were told.

To me, the most baffling puzzle is why at the present writing there seem to be no new cases in China. The government didn’t initiate its lockdown until well after the virus was established. It should have spread widely during Chinese New Year, when every plane, train, and bus is packed with people traveling all over the country. What is going on here? Again, I don’t know, and neither do you.

Whether the final global death toll is 50,000 or 500,000 or 5 million, let’s look at some other numbers to get some perspective. My point is NOT that Covid isn’t so bad and we shouldn’t do anything. Bear with me. Last year, according to the FAO , five million children worldwide died of hunger (among 162 million who are stunted and 51 million who are wasted). That is 200 times more people than have died so far from Covid-19, yet no government has declared a state of emergency or asked that we radically alter our way of life to save them. Nor do we see a comparable level of alarm and action around suicide – the mere tip of an iceberg of despair and depression – which kills over a million people a year globally and 50,000 in the USA. Or drug overdoses, which kill 70,000 in the USA, the autoimmunity epidemic, which affects 23.5 million (NIH figure) to 50 million (AARDA), or obesity, which afflicts well over 100 million. Why, for that matter, are we not in a frenzy about averting nuclear armageddon or ecological collapse, but, to the contrary, pursue choices that magnify those very dangers?

Please, the point here is not that we haven’t changed our ways to stop children from starving, so we shouldn’t change them for Covid either. It is the contrary: If we can change so radically for Covid-19, we can do it for these other conditions too. Let us ask why are we able to unify our collective will to stem this virus, but not to address other grave threats to humanity. Why, until now, has society been so frozen in its existing trajectory?

The answer is revealing. Simply, in the face of world hunger, addiction, autoimmunity, suicide, or ecological collapse, we as a society do not know what to do. Our go-to crisis responses, all of which are some version of control, aren’t very effective in addressing these conditions. Now along comes a contagious epidemic, and finally we can spring into action. It is a crisis for which control works: quarantines, lockdowns, isolation, hand-washing; control of movement, control of information, control of our bodies. That makes Covid a convenient receptacle for our inchoate fears, a place to channel our growing sense of helplessness in the face of the changes overtaking the world. Covid-19 is a threat that we know how to meet. Unlike so many of our other fears, Covid-19 offers a plan.

Our civilization’s established institutions are increasingly helpless to meet the challenges of our time. How they welcome a challenge that they finally can meet. How eager they are to embrace it as a paramount crisis. How naturally their systems of information management select for the most alarming portrayals of it. How easily the public joins the panic, embracing a threat that the authorities can handle as a proxy for the various unspeakable threats that they cannot.

Today, most of our challenges no longer succumb to force. Our antibiotics and surgery fail to meet the surging health crises of autoimmunity, addiction, and obesity. Our guns and bombs, built to conquer armies, are useless to erase hatred abroad or keep domestic violence out of our homes. Our police and prisons cannot heal the breeding conditions of crime. Our pesticides cannot restore ruined soil. Covid-19 recalls the good old days when the challenges of infectious diseases succumbed to modern medicine and hygiene, at the same time as the Nazis succumbed to the war machine, and nature itself succumbed, or so it seemed, to technological conquest and improvement. It recalls the days when our weapons worked and the world seemed indeed to be improving with each technology of control.

What kind of problem succumbs to domination and control? The kind caused by something from the outside, something Other. When the cause of the problem is something intimate to ourselves, like homelessness or inequality, addiction or obesity, there is nothing to war against. We may try to install an enemy, blaming, for example, the billionaires, Vladimir Putin, or the Devil, but then we miss key information, such as the ground conditions that allow billionaires (or viruses) to replicate in the first place.

If there is one thing our civilization is good at, it is fighting an enemy. We welcome opportunities to do what we are good at, which prove the validity of our technologies, systems, and worldview. And so, we manufacture enemies, cast problems like crime, terrorism, and disease into us-versus-them terms, and mobilize our collective energies toward those endeavors that can be seen that way. Thus, we single out Covid-19 as a call to arms, reorganizing society as if for a war effort, while treating as normal the possibility of nuclear armageddon, ecological collapse, and five million children starving.

The Conspiracy Narrative

Because Covid-19 seems to justify so many items on the totalitarian wish list, there are those who believe it to be a deliberate power play . It is not my purpose to advance that theory nor to debunk it, although I will offer some meta-level comments. First a brief overview.

The theories (there are many variants) talk about Event 201 (sponsored by the Gates Foundation, CIA, etc. last September), and a 2010 Rockefeller Foundation white paper detailing a scenario called “Lockstep,” both of which lay out the authoritarian response to a hypothetical pandemic. They observe that the infrastructure, technology, and legislative framework for martial law has been in preparation for many years. All that was needed, they say, was a way to make the public embrace it, and now that has come. Whether or not current controls are permanent, a precedent is being set for:

• • The tracking of people’s movements at all times (because coronavirus)
• • The suspension of freedom of assembly (because coronavirus)
• • The military policing of civilians (because coronavirus)
• • Extrajudicial, indefinite detention (quarantine, because coronavirus)
• • The banning of cash (because coronavirus)
• • Censorship of the Internet (to combat disinformation, because coronavirus)
• • Compulsory vaccination and other medical treatment, establishing the state’s sovereignty over our bodies (because coronavirus)
• • The classification of all activities and destinations into the expressly permitted and the expressly forbidden (you can leave your house for this, but not that), eliminating the un-policed, non-juridical gray zone. That totality is the very essence of totalitarianism. Necessary now though, because, well, coronavirus.

This is juicy material for conspiracy theories. For all I know, one of those theories could be true; however, the same progression of events could unfold from an unconscious systemic tilt toward ever-increasing control. Where does this tilt come from? It is woven into civilization’s DNA. For millennia, civilization (as opposed to small-scale traditional cultures) has understood progress as a matter of extending control onto the world: domesticating the wild, conquering the barbarians, mastering the forces of nature, and ordering society according to law and reason. The ascent of control accelerated with the Scientific Revolution, which launched “progress” to new heights: the ordering of reality into objective categories and quantities, and the mastering of materiality with technology. Finally, the social sciences promised to use the same means and methods to fulfill the ambition (which goes back to Plato and Confucius) to engineer a perfect society.

Those who administer civilization will therefore welcome any opportunity to strengthen their control, for after all, it is in service to a grand vision of human destiny: the perfectly ordered world, in which disease, crime, poverty, and perhaps suffering itself can be engineered out of existence. No nefarious motives are necessary. Of course they would like to keep track of everyone – all the better to ensure the common good. For them, Covid-19 shows how necessary that is. “Can we afford democratic freedoms in light of the coronavirus?” they ask. “Must we now, out of necessity, sacrifice those for our own safety?” It is a familiar refrain, for it has accompanied other crises in the past, like 9/11.

To rework a common metaphor, imagine a man with a hammer, stalking around looking for a reason to use it. Suddenly he sees a nail sticking out. He’s been looking for a nail for a long time, pounding on screws and bolts and not accomplishing much. He inhabits a worldview in which hammers are the best tools, and the world can be made better by pounding in the nails. And here is a nail! We might suspect that in his eagerness he has placed the nail there himself, but it hardly matters. Maybe it isn’t even a nail that’s sticking out, but it resembles one enough to start pounding. When the tool is at the ready, an opportunity will arise to use it.

And I will add, for those inclined to doubt the authorities, maybe this time it really is a nail. In that case, the hammer is the right tool – and the principle of the hammer will emerge the stronger, ready for the screw, the button, the clip, and the tear.

Either way, the problem we deal with here is much deeper than that of overthrowing an evil coterie of Illuminati. Even if they do exist, given the tilt of civilization, the same trend would persist without them, or a new Illuminati would arise to assume the functions of the old.

True or false, the idea that the epidemic is some monstrous plot perpetrated by evildoers upon the public is not so far from the mindset of find-the-pathogen. It is a crusading mentality, a war mentality. It locates the source of a sociopolitical illness in a pathogen against which we may then fight, a victimizer separate from ourselves. It risks ignoring the conditions that make society fertile ground for the plot to take hold. Whether that ground was sown deliberately or by the wind is, for me, a secondary question.

What I will say next is relevant whether or not SARS-CoV2 is a genetically engineered bioweapon, is related to 5G rollout, is being used to prevent “disclosure,” is a Trojan horse for totalitarian world government, is more deadly than we’ve been told, is less deadly than we’ve been told, originated in a Wuhan biolab, originated at Fort Detrick , or is exactly as the CDC and WHO have been telling us. It applies even if everyone is totally wrong about the role of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in the current epidemic. I have my opinions, but if there is one thing I have learned through the course of this emergency is that I don’t really know what is happening. I don’t see how anyone can, amidst the seething farrago of news, fake news, rumors, suppressed information, conspiracy theories, propaganda, and politicized narratives that fill the Internet. I wish a lot more people would embrace not knowing. I say that both to those who embrace the dominant narrative, as well as to those who hew to dissenting ones. What information might we be blocking out, in order to maintain the integrity of our viewpoints? Let’s be humble in our beliefs: it is a matter of life and death.

The War on Death

My 7-year-old son hasn’t seen or played with another child for two weeks. Millions of others are in the same boat. Most would agree that a month without social interaction for all those children a reasonable sacrifice to save a million lives. But how about to save 100,000 lives? And what if the sacrifice is not for a month but for a year? Five years? Different people will have different opinions on that, according to their underlying values.

Let’s replace the foregoing questions with something more personal, that pierces the inhuman utilitarian thinking that turns people into statistics and sacrifices some of them for something else. The relevant question for me is, Would I ask all the nation’s children to forego play for a season, if it would reduce my mother’s risk of dying, or for that matter, my own risk? Or I might ask, Would I decree the end of human hugging and handshakes, if it would save my own life? This is not to devalue Mom’s life or my own, both of which are precious. I am grateful for every day she is still with us. But these questions bring up deep issues. What is the right way to live? What is the right way to die?

The answer to such questions, whether asked on behalf of oneself or on behalf of society at large, depends on how we hold death and how much we value play, touch, and togetherness, along with civil liberties and personal freedom. There is no easy formula to balance these values.

Over my lifetime I’ve seen society place more and more emphasis on safety, security, and risk reduction. It has especially impacted childhood: as a young boy it was normal for us to roam a mile from home unsupervised – behavior that would earn parents a visit from Child Protective Services today. It also manifests in the form of latex gloves for more and more professions; hand sanitizer everywhere; locked, guarded, and surveilled school buildings; intensified airport and border security; heightened awareness of legal liability and liability insurance; metal detectors and searches before entering many sports arenas and public buildings, and so on. Writ large, it takes the form of the security state.

The mantra “safety first” comes from a value system that makes survival top priority, and that depreciates other values like fun, adventure, play, and the challenging of limits. Other cultures had different priorities. For instance, many traditional and indigenous cultures are much less protective of children, as documented in Jean Liedloff’s classic, The Continuum Concept . They allow them risks and responsibilities that would seem insane to most modern people, believing that this is necessary for children to develop self-reliance and good judgement. I think most modern people, especially younger people, retain some of this inherent willingness to sacrifice safety in order to live life fully. The surrounding culture, however, lobbies us relentlessly to live in fear, and has constructed systems that embody fear. In them, staying safe is over-ridingly important. Thus we have a medical system in which most decisions are based on calculations of risk, and in which the worst possible outcome, marking the physician’s ultimate failure, is death. Yet all the while, we know that death awaits us regardless. A life saved actually means a death postponed.

The ultimate fulfillment of civilization’s program of control would be to triumph over death itself. Failing that, modern society settles for a facsimile of that triumph: denial rather than conquest. Ours is a society of death denial, from its hiding away of corpses, to its fetish for youthfulness, to its warehousing of old people in nursing homes. Even its obsession with money and property – extensions of the self, as the word “mine” indicates – expresses the delusion that the impermanent self can be made permanent through its attachments. All this is inevitable given the story-of-self that modernity offers: the separate individual in a world of Other. Surrounded by genetic, social, and economic competitors, that self must protect and dominate in order to thrive. It must do everything it can to forestall death, which (in the story of separation) is total annihilation. Biological science has even taught us that our very nature is to maximize our chances of surviving and reproducing.

I asked a friend, a medical doctor who has spent time with the Q’ero on Peru, whether the Q’ero would (if they could) intubate someone to prolong their life. “Of course not,” she said. “They would summon the shaman to help him die well.” Dying well (which isn’t necessarily the same as dying painlessly) is not much in today’s medical vocabulary. No hospital records are kept on whether patients die well. That would not be counted as a positive outcome. In the world of the separate self, death is the ultimate catastrophe.

But is it? Consider this perspectiv e from Dr. Lissa Rankin: “Not all of us would want to be in an ICU, isolated from loved ones with a machine breathing for us, at risk of dying alone- even if it means they might increase their chance of survival. Some of us might rather be held in the arms of loved ones at home, even if that means our time has come…. Remember, death is no ending. Death is going home.”

When the self is understood as relational, interdependent, even inter-existent, then it bleeds over into the other, and the other bleeds over into the self. Understanding the self as a locus of consciousness in a matrix of relationship, one no longer searches for an enemy as the key to understanding every problem, but looks instead for imbalances in relationships. The War on Death gives way to the quest to live well and fully, and we see that fear of death is actually fear of life. How much of life will we forego to stay safe?

Totalitarianism – the perfection of control – is the inevitable end product of the mythology of the separate self. What else but a threat to life, like a war, would merit total control? Thus Orwell identified perpetual war as a crucial component of the Party’s rule.

Against the backdrop of the program of control, death denial, and the separate self, the assumption that public policy should seek to minimize the number of deaths is nearly beyond question, a goal to which other values like play, freedom, etc. are subordinate. Covid-19 offers occasion to broaden that view. Yes, let us hold life sacred, more sacred than ever. Death teaches us that. Let us hold each person, young or old, sick or well, as the sacred, precious, beloved being that they are. And in the circle of our hearts, let us make room for other sacred values too. To hold life sacred is not just to live long, it is to live well and right and fully.

Like all fear, the fear around the coronavirus hints at what might lie beyond it. Anyone who has experienced the passing of someone close knows that death is a portal to love. Covid-19 has elevated death to prominence in the consciousness of a society that denies it. On the other side of the fear, we can see the love that death liberates. Let it pour forth. Let it saturate the soil of our culture and fill its aquifers so that it seeps up through the cracks of our crusted institutions, our systems, and our habits. Some of these may die too.

What world shall we live in?

How much of life do we want to sacrifice at the altar of security? If it keeps us safer, do we want to live in a world where human beings never congregate? Do we want to wear masks in public all the time? Do we want to be medically examined every time we travel, if that will save some number of lives a year? Are we willing to accept the medicalization of life in general, handing over final sovereignty over our bodies to medical authorities (as selected by political ones)? Do we want every event to be a virtual event? How much are we willing to live in fear?

Covid-19 will eventually subside, but the threat of infectious disease is permanent. Our response to it sets a course for the future. Public life, communal life, the life of shared physicality has been dwindling over several generations. Instead of shopping at stores, we get things delivered to our homes. Instead of packs of kids playing outside, we have play dates and digital adventures. Instead of the public square, we have the online forum. Do we want to continue to insulate ourselves still further from each other and the world?

It is not hard to imagine, especially if social distancing is successful, that Covid-19 persists beyond the 18 months we are being told to expect for it to run its course. It is not hard to imagine that new viruses will emerge during that time. It is not hard to imagine that emergency measures will become normal (so as to forestall the possibility of another outbreak), just as the state of emergency declared after 9/11 is still in effect today. It is not hard to imagine that (as we are being told), reinfection is possible, so that the disease will never run its course. That means that the temporary changes in our way of life may become permanent.

To reduce the risk of another pandemic, shall we choose to live in a society without hugs, handshakes, and high-fives, forever more? Shall we choose to live in a society where we no longer gather en masse? Shall the concert, the sports competition, and the festival be a thing of the past? Shall children no longer play with other children? Shall all human contact be mediated by computers and masks? No more dance classes, no more karate classes, no more conferences, no more churches? Is death reduction to be the standard by which to measure progress? Does human advancement mean separation? Is this the future?

The same question applies to the administrative tools required to control the movement of people and the flow of information. At the present writing, the entire country is moving toward lockdown. In some countries, one must print out a form from a government website in order to leave the house. It reminds me of school, where one’s location must be authorized at all times. Or of prison. Do we envision a future of electronic hall passes, a system where freedom of movement is governed by state administrators and their software at all times, permanently? Where every movement is tracked, either permitted or prohibited? And, for our protection, where information that threatens our health (as decided, again, by various authorities) is censored for our own good? In the face of an emergency, like unto a state of war, we accept such restrictions and temporarily surrender our freedoms. Similar to 9/11, Covid-19 trumps all objections.

For the first time in history, the technological means exist to realize such a vision, at least in the developed world (for example, using cellphone location data to enforce social distancing; see also here ). After a bumpy transition, we could live in a society where nearly all of life happens online: shopping, meeting, entertainment, socializing, working, even dating. Is that what we want? How many lives saved is that worth?

I am sure that many of the controls in effect today will be partially relaxed in a few months. Partially relaxed, but at the ready. As long as infectious disease remains with us, they are likely to be reimposed, again and again, in the future, or be self-imposed in the form of habits. As Deborah Tannen says, contributing to a Politico article on how coronavirus will change the world permanently, ‘We know now that touching things, being with other people and breathing the air in an enclosed space can be risky…. It could become second nature to recoil from shaking hands or touching our faces—and we may all fall heir to society-wide OCD, as none of us can stop washing our hands.” After thousands of years, millions of years, of touch, contact, and togetherness, is the pinnacle of human progress to be that we cease such activities because they are too risky?

Life is Community

The paradox of the program of control is that its progress rarely advances us any closer to its goal. Despite security systems in almost every upper middle-class home, people are no less anxious or insecure than they were a generation ago. Despite elaborate security measures, the schools are not seeing fewer mass shootings. Despite phenomenal progress in medical technology, people have if anything become less healthy over the past thirty years, as chronic disease has proliferated and life expectancy stagnated and, in the USA and Britain, started to decline.

The measures being instituted to control Covid-19, likewise, may end up causing more suffering and death than they prevent. Minimizing deaths means minimizing the deaths that we know how to predict and measure. It is impossible to measure the added deaths that might come from isolation-induced depression, for instance, or the despair caused by unemployment, or the lowered immunity and deterioration in health that chronic fear can cause. Loneliness and lack of social contact has been shown to increase inflammation , depression , and dementia . According to Lissa Rankin, M.D. , air pollution increases risk of dying by 6%, obesity by 23%, alcohol abuse by 37%, and loneliness by 45%.

Another danger that is off the ledger is the deterioration in immunity caused by excessive hygiene and distancing. It is not only social contact that is necessary for health, it is also contact with the microbial world. Generally speaking, microbes are not our enemies, they are our allies in health. A diverse gut biome, comprising bacteria, viruses, yeasts, and other organisms, is essential for a well-functioning immune system, and its diversity is maintained through contact with other people and with the world of life. Excessive hand-washing, overuse of antibiotics, aseptic cleanliness, and lack of human contact might do more harm than good . The resulting allergies and autoimmune disorders might be worse than the infectious disease they replace. Socially and biologically, health comes from community. Life does not thrive in isolation.

Seeing the world in us-versus-them terms blinds us to the reality that life and health happen in community. To take the example of infectious diseases, we fail to look beyond the evil pathogen and ask, What is the role of viruses in the microbiome ? (See also here .) What are the body conditions under which harmful viruses proliferate? Why do some people have mild symptoms and others severe ones (besides the catch-all non-explanation of “low resistance”)? What positive role might flus, colds, and other non-lethal diseases play in the maintenance of health?

War-on-germs thinking brings results akin to those of the War on Terror, War on Crime, War on Weeds, and the endless wars we fight politically and interpersonally. First, it generates endless war; second, it diverts attention from the ground conditions that breed illness, terrorism, crime, weeds, and the rest.

Despite politicians’ perennial claim that they pursue war for the sake of peace, war inevitably breeds more war. Bombing countries to kill terrorists not only ignores the ground conditions of terrorism, it exacerbates those conditions. Locking up criminals not only ignores the conditions that breed crime, it creates those conditions when it breaks up families and communities and acculturates the incarcerated to criminality. And regimes of antibiotics, vaccines, antivirals, and other medicines wreak havoc on body ecology, which is the foundation of strong immunity. Outside the body, the massive spraying campaigns sparked by Zika , Dengue Fever, and now Covid-19 will visit untold damage upon nature’s ecology. Has anyone considered what the effects on the ecosystem will be when we douse it with antiviral compounds? Such a policy (which has been implemented in various places in China and India) is only thinkable from the mindset of separation, which does not understand that viruses are integral to the web of life.

To understand the point about ground conditions, consider some mortality statistics from Italy (from its National Health Institute), based on an analysis of hundreds of Covid-19 fatalities. Of those analyzed, less than 1% were free of serious chronic health conditions. Some 75% suffered from hypertension, 35% from diabetes, 33% from cardiac ischemia, 24% from atrial fibrillation, 18% from low renal function, along with other conditions that I couldn’t decipher from the Italian report . Nearly half the deceased had three or more of these serious pathologies. Americans, beset by obesity, diabetes, and other chronic ailments, are at least as vulnerable as Italians. Should we blame the virus then (which killed few otherwise healthy people), or shall we blame underlying poor health? Here again the analogy of the taut rope applies. Millions of people in the modern world are in a precarious state of health, just waiting for something that would normally be trivial to send them over the edge. Of course, in the short term we want to save their lives; the danger is that we lose ourselves in an endless succession of short terms, fighting one infectious disease after another, and never engage the ground conditions that make people so vulnerable. That is a much harder problem, because these ground conditions will not change via fighting. There is no pathogen that causes diabetes or obesity, addiction, depression, or PTSD. Their causes are not an Other, not some virus separate from ourselves, and we its victims.

Even in diseases like Covid-19, in which we can name a pathogenic virus, matters are not so simple as a war between virus and victim. There is an alternative to the germ theory of disease that holds germs to be part of a larger process. When conditions are right, they multiply in the body, sometimes killing the host, but also, potentially, improving the conditions that accommodated them to begin with, for example by cleaning out accumulated toxic debris via mucus discharge, or (metaphorically speaking) burning them up with fever. Sometimes called “terrain theory,” it says that germs are more symptom than cause of disease. As one meme explains it: “Your fish is sick. Germ theory: isolate the fish. Terrain theory: clean the tank.”

A certain schizophrenia afflicts the modern culture of health. On the one hand, there is a burgeoning wellness movement that embraces alternative and holistic medicine. It advocates herbs, meditation, and yoga to boost immunity. It validates the emotional and spiritual dimensions of health, such as the power of attitudes and beliefs to sicken or to heal. All of this seems to have disappeared under the Covid tsunami, as society defaults to the old orthodoxy.

Case in point: California acupuncturists have been forced to shut down, having been deemed “non-essential.” This is perfectly understandable from the perspective of conventional virology. But as one acupuncturist on Facebook observed, “What about my patient who I’m working with to get off opioids for his back pain? He’s going to have to start using them again.” From the worldview of medical authority, alternative modalities, social interaction, yoga classes, supplements, and so on are frivolous when it comes to real diseases caused by real viruses. They are relegated to an etheric realm of “wellness” in the face of a crisis. The resurgence of orthodoxy under Covid-19 is so intense that anything remotely unconventional, such as intravenous vitamin C , was completely off the table in the United States until two days ago (articles still abound “debunking” the “myth” that vitamin C can help fight Covid-19). Nor have I heard the CDC evangelize the benefits of elderberry extract, medicinal mushrooms, cutting sugar intake, NAC (N-acetyl L-cysteine), astragalus, or vitamin D. These are not just mushy speculation about “wellness,” but are supported by extensive research and physiological explanations. For example, NAC ( general info , double-blind placebo-controlled study ) has been shown to radically reduce incidence and severity of symptoms in flu-like illnesses.

As the statistics I offered earlier on autoimmunity, obesity, etc. indicate, America and the modern world in general are facing a health crisis. Is the answer to do what we’ve been doing, only more thoroughly? The response so far to Covid has been to double down on the orthodoxy and sweep unconventional practices and dissenting viewpoints aside. Another response would be to widen our lens and examine the entire system, including who pays for it, how access is granted, and how research is funded, but also expanding out to include marginal fields like herbal medicine, functional medicine, and energy medicine. Perhaps we can take this opportunity to reevaluate prevailing theories of illness, health, and the body. Yes, let’s protect the sickened fish as best we can right now, but maybe next time we won’t have to isolate and drug so many fish, if we can clean the tank.

I’m not telling you to run out right now and buy NAC or any other supplement, nor that we as a society should abruptly shift our response, cease social distancing immediately, and start taking supplements instead. But we can use the break in normal, this pause at a crossroads, to consciously choose what path we shall follow moving forward: what kind of healthcare system, what paradigm of health, what kind of society. This reevaluation is already happening, as ideas like universal free healthcare in the USA gain new momentum. And that path leads to forks as well. What kind of healthcare will be universalized? Will it be merely available to all, or mandatory for all – each citizen a patient, perhaps with an invisible ink barcode tattoo certifying one is up to date on all compulsory vaccines and check-ups. Then you can go to school, board a plane, or enter a restaurant. This is one path to the future that is available to us.

Another option is available now too. Instead of doubling down on control, we could finally embrace the holistic paradigms and practices that have been waiting on the margins, waiting for the center to dissolve so that, in our humbled state, we can bring them into the center and build a new system around them.

There is an alternative to the paradise of perfect control that our civilization has so long pursued, and that recedes as fast as our progress, like a mirage on the horizon. Yes, we can proceed as before down the path toward greater insulation, isolation, domination, and separation. We can normalize heightened levels of separation and control, believe that they are necessary to keep us safe, and accept a world in which we are afraid to be near each other. Or we can take advantage of this pause, this break in normal, to turn onto a path of reunion, of holism, of the restoring of lost connections, of the repair of community and the rejoining of the web of life.

Do we double down on protecting the separate self, or do we accept the invitation into a world where all of us are in this together? It isn’t just in medicine we encounter this question: it visits us politically, economically, and in our personal lives as well. Take for example the issue of hoarding, which embodies the idea, “There won’t be enough for everyone, so I am going to make sure there is enough for me.” Another response might be, “Some don’t have enough, so I will share what I have with them.” Are we to be survivalists or helpers? What is life for?

On a larger scale, people are asking questions that have until now lurked on activist margins. What should we do about the homeless? What should we do about the people in prisons? In Third World slums? What should we do about the unemployed? What about all the hotel maids, the Uber drivers, the plumbers and janitors and bus drivers and cashiers who cannot work from home? And so now, finally, ideas like student debt relief and universal basic income are blossoming. “How do we protect those susceptible to Covid?” invites us into “How do we care for vulnerable people in general?”

That is the impulse that stirs in us, regardless of the superficialities of our opinions about Covid’s severity, origin, or best policy to address it. It is saying, let’s get serious about taking care of each other. Let’s remember how precious we all are and how precious life is. Let’s take inventory of our civilization, strip it down to its studs, and see if we can build one more beautiful.

As Covid stirs our compassion, more and more of us realize that we don’t want to go back to a normal so sorely lacking it. We have the opportunity now to forge a new, more compassionate normal.

Hopeful signs abound that this is happening. The United States government, which has long seemed the captive of heartless corporate interests, has unleashed hundreds of billions of dollars in direct payments to families. Donald Trump, not known as a paragon of compassion, has put a moratorium on foreclosures and evictions. Certainly one can take a cynical view of both these developments; nonetheless, they embody the principle of caring for the vulnerable.

From all over the world we hear stories of solidarity and healing. One friend described sending $100 each to ten strangers who were in dire need. My son, who until a few days ago worked at Dunkin’ Donuts, said people were tipping at five times the normal rate – and these are working class people, many of them Hispanic truck drivers, who are economically insecure themselves. Doctors, nurses, and “essential workers” in other professions risk their lives to serve the public. Here are some more examples of the love and kindness eruption, courtesy of ServiceSpace :

Perhaps we’re in the middle of living into that new story. Imagine Italian airforce using Pavoratti, Spanish military doing acts of service, and street police playing guitars — to *inspire*. Corporations giving unexpected wage hikes. Canadians starting “Kindness Mongering.” Six year old in Australia adorably gifting her tooth fairy money, an 8th grader in Japan making 612 masks , and college kids everywhere buying groceries for elders. Cuba sending an army in “ white robes ” (doctors) to help Italy. A landlord allowing tenants to stay without rent, an Irish priest’s poem going viral, disabled activitists producing hand sanitizer. Imagine. Sometimes a crisis mirrors our deepest impulse — that we can always respond with compassion.

As Rebecca Solnit describes in her marvelous book, A Paradise Built in Hell , disaster often liberates solidarity. A more beautiful world shimmers just beneath the surface, bobbing up whenever the systems that hold it underwater loosen their grip.

For a long time we, as a collective, have stood helpless in the face of an ever-sickening society. Whether it is declining health, decaying infrastructure, depression, suicide, addiction, ecological degradation, or concentration of wealth, the symptoms of civilizational malaise in the developed world are plain to see, but we have been stuck in the systems and patterns that cause them. Now, Covid has gifted us a reset.

A million forking paths lie before us. Universal basic income could mean an end to economic insecurity and the flowering of creativity as millions are freed from the work that Covid has shown us is less necessary than we thought. Or it could mean, with the decimation of small businesses, dependency on the state for a stipend that comes with strict conditions. The crisis could usher in totalitarianism or solidarity; medical martial law or a holistic renaissance; greater fear of the microbial world, or greater resiliency in participation in it; permanent norms of social distancing, or a renewed desire to come together.

What can guide us, as individuals and as a society, as we walk the garden of forking paths? At each junction, we can be aware of what we follow: fear or love, self-preservation or generosity. Shall we live in fear and build a society based on it? Shall we live to preserve our separate selves? Shall we use the crisis as a weapon against our political enemies? These are not all-or-nothing questions, all fear or all love. It is that a next step into love lies before us. It feels daring, but not reckless. It treasures life, while accepting death. And it trusts that with each step, the next will become visible.

Please don’t think that choosing love over fear can be accomplished solely through an act of will, and that fear too can be conquered like a virus. The virus we face here is fear, whether it is fear of Covid-19, or fear of the totalitarian response to it, and this virus too has its terrain. Fear, along with addiction, depression, and a host of physical ills, flourishes in a terrain of separation and trauma: inherited trauma, childhood trauma, violence, war, abuse, neglect, shame, punishment, poverty, and the muted, normalized trauma that affects nearly everyone who lives in a monetized economy, undergoes modern schooling, or lives without community or connection to place. This terrain can be changed , by trauma healing on a personal level, by systemic change toward a more compassionate society, and by transforming the basic narrative of separation: the separate self in a world of other, me separate from you, humanity separate from nature. To be alone is a primal fear, and modern society has rendered us more and more alone. But the time of Reunion is here. Every act of compassion, kindness, courage, or generosity heals us from the story of separation, because it assures both actor and witness that we are in this together.

I will conclude by invoking one more dimension of the relationship between humans and viruses. Viruses are integral to evolution, not just of humans but of all eukaryotes. Viruses can transfer DNA from organism to organism, sometimes inserting it into the germline (where it becomes heritable). Known as horizontal gene transfer, this is a primary mechanism of evolution, allowing life to evolve together much faster than is possible through random mutation. As Lynn Margulis once put it, we are our viruses.

And now let me venture into speculative territory. Perhaps the great diseases of civilization have quickened our biological and cultural evolution, bestowing key genetic information and offering both individual and collective initiation. Could the current pandemic be just that? Novel RNA codes are spreading from human to human, imbuing us with new genetic information; at the same time, we are receiving other, esoteric, “codes” that ride the back of the biological ones, disrupting our narratives and systems in the same way that an illness disrupts bodily physiology. The phenomenon follows the template of initiation: separation from normality, followed by a dilemma, breakdown, or ordeal, followed (if it is to be complete) by reintegration and celebration.

Now the question arises: Initiation into what? What is the specific nature and purpose of this initiation?The popular name for the pandemic offers a clue: coronavirus. A corona is a crown. “Novel coronavirus pandemic” means “a new coronation for all.”

Already we can feel the power of who we might become. A true sovereign does not run in fear from life or from death. A true sovereign does not dominate and conquer (that is a shadow archetype, the Tyrant). The true sovereign serves the people, serves life, and respects the sovereignty of all people. The coronation marks the emergence of the unconscious into consciousness, the crystallization of chaos into order, the transcendence of compulsion into choice. We become the rulers of that which had ruled us. The New World Order that the conspiracy theorists fear is a shadow of the glorious possibility available to sovereign beings. No longer the vassals of fear, we can bring order to the kingdom and build an intentional society on the love already shining through the cracks of the world of separation.

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Writing Letters to My Younger Self

• By Margot Starbuck By Rebecca St. James By Ellie Holcomb By Valerie Shepard
• December 20, 2023

From: Rebecca St. James

To: teenage rebecca.

Hi dear younger self . . . teenage Rebecca! 😄

I want to give you a little encouragement and wisdom that can help you navigate the upcoming years of your life. First, I want to say that you are a gift to others. The spirit God gave you, and how He made you, is a blessing to others.

It is not about performance or doing or accomplishing, but being in Him. You could sit in a room not doing or saying anything and still be a gift to a friend or family member because of the presence of Jesus alive and active in your spirit. Rest in His love for you.

I encourage you to be gentle and gracious with yourself , knowing that God calls us to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. We can only love others and show grace to them to the level that we can show love and grace to ourselves. Take thoughts captive regularly and bring them into submission to Jesus, especially when those thoughts might be harsh or critical.

Something I have learned to say to myself more often in this season of life is there is grace for you . So very thankful for this truth!

May God bless you, young Bec. You are a girl who has a special destiny, and you are His beloved daughter. Live out the adventure to which He has called you.

You are here for such a time as this.

From: Ellie Holcomb

To: teenage ellie.

Sweet girl,

I know there are days when you’re just tired of trying to measure up. You see a girl who’s not enough when you look in the mirror . I know there are nights when all you want to do is hide. Every time you look inside, you’re face-to-face with failure.

Please don’t forget to remember:

You are loved. Even on the days you’ve run the other way. Even on the days you’ve made a mountain of mistakes. Nothing will change God’s love for you.

You don’t have to look into the eyes of every guy you meet to see if you’re wanted. You’re already wanted, and not because you’re perfect or because of what you’ve accomplished. You are wanted and loved by God because you are His. You don’t think you’re worth that kind of grace, but if you just look toward His face, you’ll know it.

You’re searching for something that will stir your soul, for something that will make you feel less alone, but you know firsthand that all those efforts aren’t working. Your precious heart has been broken, and you’ve felt useless and discarded, unwanted, unworthy and unloved. But even in the wake of all that pain, you are seen and beloved. God knew before you ever took a breath that there would be days you would forget how beautiful He made you and how deeply He loves you.

He sees you. He chose you. You’re covered forever by His love. You’re a beloved daughter, and God is able to love you better than anyone will ever be able to.

So lift your eyes to the hills. Remember where your help comes from. Your help comes from the Lord, Maker of heaven and earth. Maker of your precious, beautiful heart. He holds you in His everlasting arms, and He never slumbers or sleeps. Let His love heal, restore and renew you. When you’re wrung out—and there are times you will be—let His love fill you so full that all your mess and mistakes will be mixed up with all His love.

The Light of the World lives inside you. Shine on, sweet girl. You’ll never walk through anything alone.

From: Valerie Shepard

To: teenage val.

Val, take stock of your time, and listen to the whisper of the Holy Spirit in your heart, who is reminding you to make your studies a priority. Ask God to give you a heart that wants to please and glorify Him. He will truly help you if you are willing to humble yourself and seriously take His Word to heart.

You’re good at keeping a journal, and you ask your Father in heaven to help you, but that’s where it ends. You must begin and end the day with wanting to please Him and asking for His help throughout the day to get serious about studies.

Val, you have a whole lifetime ahead of you, so while you’re a teen, be serious about following Jesus. And be respectful to all teachers—you remember that time you threw a notebook at your geometry teacher because he dared you to? That was truly uncalled for, and although you made the class laugh, it did not help you to honor your teacher.

There is nothing wrong with fun, and you have had good friends to have fun with, but learn also to take the serious things seriously.

Love in Him,

An older and a wiser Val

A Letter to My Future Self

Help yourself stay the course by penning an encouraging note.

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been a “chronicler,” and I have a crate full of colorful spiral notebooks in the attic to prove it. In fifth grade, I drafted the handbook for the Spicy Business Club, where my two best friends and I dished about the boys we liked and used secret code names for them.

In high school, I wrote about the weekend adventures I had with my friends from youth group. (We may or may not have crashed someone’s fancy dinner date before prom.) And our senior year of high school, I had everyone in my friend group make predictions about what our lives would be like 15 years later. (If you must know, Helen was voted “Most Likely to Be a Soccer Mom,” and I may have been voted “Most Likely to Be on the ‘Oprah Winfrey Show.’ ”) While those predictions were admittedly goofy, we had fun imagining our future lives.

Who is God calling you to be?

The year I graduated from college, my notebooks took on more meaning. I’d encountered the person of Jesus, and I wanted to live a life that pleased God and honored the way He had uniquely created me. Would I find a job using my creative gifts or serve folks on the world’s margins? Would I go to graduate school or dive right into full-time ministry? I love that I can return to those notebooks to see who I was in those moments and who I believed God was calling me to be.

Whether you’re 12 or 20, I encourage you to take the time to write a letter to your future self. Specifically, write it to the future you who will be a decade or two older than you are today. This is a great way to keep your life and faith on track as the years go by.

How your reflections can help

To make the letter your own, consider focusing on these topics:

• Write about who God has been in your life and who God is in your life today.
• Describe the way you want your faith to shape your life in the future. What core values are you committing yourself to? (For example: “Love God, love people” or “Share Jesus with the people around me.”)
• Notice and name the unique gifts, experiences and passions God has given you. Be specific. Offer those to God.
• Ask your parents, youth group leader or another trusted adult what qualities they see in you that are a delight to God. Then humbly include those in your letter.
• Ask God to lead you in the paths He has prepared for you, and commit to walking in that good way.

What unique experiences has God given me?

Who has God been in My life?

What unique gifts has God given me?

How do I want my faith to shape my life in the future?

What do My parents or youth leaders say about me?

What unique passions has God given me?

Who is God in my life today?

Where to safely keep your letter

After writing your letter, put it in a special place—a shiny box under your bed, the top shelf of your closet or the back of your underwear drawer. Then pull out your letter on a special day each year—such as New Year’s or your birthday—and reread it, praying for God to continue guiding your steps.

God made you unique in this enormous world and is inviting you to trust Him with your present and your future. This letter can remind you to always say yes to Jesus and the adventure He has planned for your life.

© 2024 Rebecca St. James, Ellie Holcomb, Valerie Shepard & Margot Starbuck. Used by permission. All rights reserved. This article first appeared in the February/March 2024 issue of Brio magazine as “Letters to My Younger Self.”

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About the Author

Margot Starbuck

Margot Starbuck is a public speaker and an award-winning author of nine books including Not Who I Imagined , Permission Granted and Unsqueezed . She is also a ghostwriter, an editorial adviser, a writing consultant and a columnist for Today’s Christian Woman . Margot is a passionate advocate for supporting impoverished children, disabled people and indigenous leaders of youth development organizations. Learn more about Margot by visiting her website, www.margotstarbuck.com .

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ETSU seniors: A letter to my younger self

We asked a few of our May 2024 graduating seniors the question, “If you could write a letter to your younger self as a first-year student, what words of wisdom or advice would you share?” Here are their letters . . .

Daniel Escarcega

B.S., Biomedical Engineering Technology Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

As a graduating senior, I would give my freshman self a few pieces of advice. I would really emphasize how important it is to find balance between academics, friendships, and personal well-being. I strived to be the best student, but I forgot about taking care of myself. That's where friends come into play. My best friend, Seth, and I became so close, I found a brother for life. That's the type of friendship I would recommend finding. As for taking care of yourself, it's ok to take time for yourself. There are a bunch of resources available to use, and I highly encourage everyone to use them if needed. Another thing to always keep in mind is to constantly remind yourself that you are doing an amazing job, and that you should be proud of yourself. The last piece of advice is to embrace any failure you will come across. It's ok to fail; we are not perfect. It is a learning opportunity for everyone, and it should always encourage you to seek help when needed! 

B.S., History Gray, Tennessee

Congrats on your first year at ETSU! You have a great four years ahead, so don’t feel intimidated! With that being said, your time at ETSU will be really hard. You will face obstacles that will make you uncomfortable. Keep going. No matter what, keep going. A wise man once said, “life is like running a race; if you keep your head down and focus on one step at a time, someone will stop you and tell you that you crossed the finish line.” Yes, your classes were hard, especially with the thesis, and yes, student teaching and the edTPA were really hard, but you will make it. No matter the Goliath that stands in your way, God will use you like he did David.

You were right, The Well changed your life. You met the greatest friends of your life, and yes! You even met her. That doesn’t make it easy though. Be a F.A.T. person. Be F aithful, A vailable, and T eachable. You’re not always going to be right or fun, but put your faith in God. Also, cut the hair – it looks dumb! Let God change you in all the ways you want to be – do not hold on to who you were , change into who you want to be. There are Goliaths that look big, but God is bigger. Just keep going! Be willing to change. Make someone smile. Ask how someone is doing. Reach out, even if it’s uncomfortable. Make friends- you’ll learn what true friendship and relationships are. 

Above all, trust God. Be willing to leave college completely different than how you came in. 

Abbie Herbert

B.S., Nursing Gray, Tennessee

To my younger self:

I want to begin by telling you that going to college will be an unforgettable time. I know you're nervous and yet so excited to be going to ETSU. Trust me, you have made the right decision wanting to be a nurse.  I know you were unsure of your career choice, but you will be the most incredible RN. You are going to meet the most amazing people through nursing school and lifelong friends through Kappa Delta.  Just remember that college is filled with unexpected twists, turns, and most importantly some amazing moments you will never forget.

You got this and GO BUCS!

Nadia Manuel

B.S., Biology Morristown, Tennessee

Dear Nadia,

It is the start of COVID, and you are moving to an unknown city. It’s going to be scary and overwhelming being away from your family. Just because it’s going to be hard does not mean it won’t be worth it. Trust me, it will. All you have to worry about is enjoying it. Take every day in one by one. Take those tiny steps and celebrate those accomplishments. Don’t be afraid to be outgoing. Don’t ever stop doing the things you love and enjoy. You will meet some of the best people there.

I know you’ve heard the challenge that comes with being a biology major. Don’t give up and don’t compare yourself to everyone else. You know you are more than capable. The next four years will come with ups and downs both in your studies and in your social life. That just makes the journey so much more worth it. You will never forget these four years so make them count. Make the blood, sweat, and tears count. You have the greatest support system cheering you on. Take a deep breath and take it all in because no matter how hard it gets; you’ll wish you were still sitting in that chair staring at your screen waiting for Biology 1 to begin with four years ahead of you.

Miranda Meredith

B.S., Media and Communication Clinton, Tennessee

Dear nervous freshman version of Miranda Hall,

I just scrolled through the past four years of pictures on my phone. You don’t know this yet, but these are about to be the best four years of your life.

The first year will be hard. You’ll take a lot of pictures of a beautiful but empty campus and lots of lonely selfies trying to figure out how to style a mask (in outfits no one will ever see). At the end of the first semester, you’ll also have your first couple selfies with new friends. By the summer, you’ll have pictures of you leading orientation for other new, nervous ETSU students.

The next three years are going to be an amazing, beautiful blur of pictures with friends; photographs of you traveling to Ecuador, England, and Japan through ETSU; and even pictures of you with a college boyfriend, then fiancé, then husband! Finally, you’re going to take bittersweet graduation pictures with a wonderful group of best friends you will have had since freshman year.

Remember to enjoy the next four years, and take lots of pictures!

Love from your bright future as an ETSU alumna, Miranda Meredith

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Letter to My Younger Self

Dear 16-year-old Swin,

Whew, O.K. … you gotta take a breath, kid. Get it together.

I know Mom just handed you a perfectly rectangular 14-by-8-by-5-inch box covered in brightly colored wrapping paper. And I know you know what that box could have inside. That it might possibly contain some, oh I don’t know … new sneakers! More specifically: Air Jordan 10s. The white ones with the black soles.

The ones you’ve been dreaming about.

Maybe the typical 16-year-old girl celebrating her birthday would be hoping for a diamond necklace or one of those ThinkPads with the built-in CD drive or even their own Audi AWD sedan. But you? You’re definitely not typical. Never have been. You’ve got your heart set on those Jordans — you’d trade a diamond necklace for those things any day. Getting your very own pair would be like bridging the gap between you and MJ as basketball players. It’d mean having the chance to rock what the best player in the game is rocking. And now, you’re maybe just seconds away from all of that.

So I get it. I understand why you’re so amped up.

But before things get too, too hectic, listen to me for just a second. Take a moment to think about where that box came from. How it came to be. Think about the woman responsible for that box, and what’s inside. Think about … Mom.

No matter what this gift ends up being, just know that Mom worked her butt off for it. You know all those hours you spend hooping? Well, quadruple that. And then add a dozen more hours. And you’ll still be shy of how long it took Mom to save up for this gift. That’s what Mom’s doing for you. So when you rip open that wrapping paper, do me a favor and take a few seconds to appreciate not just this present, but all that this woman has done for you over the years.

Then, slip on those Jordans and … begin to dream. Lace them up and dream as big as you possibly can, Swin. Because I’m here to tell you that things are about to get real good, real fast.

You’re not going to believe what’s in store for you.  

In the years to come, you’re going to discover opportunities that are far beyond anything you can imagine right now. Before too long, you’ll be an All-America, an NCAA champion and an Olympic gold medalist, and then … get ready for this one … a WNBA champion.

I know that last part probably sounds weird to you, or impossible. But yes, you heard that right — a WNBA champion. Like with a W at the front, as in Women’s .

I’ll get into that later, though. Right now, I just want you to take a look at the way things are here at home, in McKeesport, Pennsylvania. Let’s start there.

You know how you and your cousins cut out the bottom of that milk crate and nailed it to a telephone pole out in front of the house so you could hoop? That’s actually what I need you to focus on for starters.

Playing basketball with a broken milk crate attached to a telephone pole definitely isn’t glamorous. For some people, it’s not the kind of thing they’d brag about to their friends. But, truth be told, that’s the beauty of the game, Swin. A dreamer can play anywhere. It’s something to be proud of, Swin. It really is. It says a lot about who you are. There’s something undeniably resourceful about doing that, something to be said for finding a way to work with what you have.

Then building out from there. Little by little.

And with you, it’s not just working with what you have, but also with who you have. When it comes to having someone in your corner, you’ll never have to think twice about who it’ll be. From Day One, Mom will be your go-to person. You being born when she was young means the two of you will pretty much grow up together. Before long, coaches and teachers will be doing double takes, mistaking you for Mom.

Other times it’ll be like, “Oh wow, I remember when your mom was in my class. She sat right over there!” Or, “Are you Cynthia’s kid? You rebound just like her.”

Growing up in the same town, going to the same schools, playing the same sport — there is going to be a lot that the two of you share in the coming years. Not too long from now, coaches and parents of teammates will start pulling Mom aside after games, or in the supermarket — basically, wherever they can grab her attention for a few seconds.

“Is Swin looking at getting a scholarship to play in college?”

“Has Swin started thinking about recruiting yet? That girl can go D-I!”

And sure enough, right around sophomore year, you and Mom will sit down to talk about all that stuff. It won’t take long for baseball and theater and cheerleading and about a dozen other hobbies to melt away. Once she helps you understand that basketball can get you to college, and even earn you a free ride? Well, yeah … that’s gonna change everything.

From Day One, Mom will be your go-to person. You being born when she was young means the two of you will pretty much grow up together. Before long, coaches and teachers will be doing double takes, mistaking you for Mom.Swin Cash

By the time you graduate, you’ll have dominated the high school basketball scene in Western Pennsylvania and have committed to play for the mighty UConn Huskies. But not before Mom makes you go on all five of your official visits. Those are the kinds of decisions she’ll make sure you’re fully thinking through. When it comes to your future, she’ll never let you just wing it.

Once you get to Storrs, Coach Auriemma will expect you to bring that It factor, and, almost immediately, he’ll put you in the starting lineup alongside some of the greatest players in the history of the sport. When that happens, Swin.…

You’re gonna rise to the occasion — All-America, two-time NCAA champion, NCAA Tournament Most Outstanding Player.

And, off the court, the fact that Mom always forced you to consider the pros and cons of every decision growing up will prepare you for when it’s actually time to make choices about things like which major to choose and what career to pursue.

In her own way, Mom is always going to be doing what she can to guide you. You’ll realize soon enough that all this time she’s been instilling within you one main lesson: In about a million different ways she’s going to teach you that positive outcomes don’t appear out of thin air. They aren’t the result of magic.

If you want to be successful, you need to put in work and never give up.

Whether it’s getting good grades, winning a state championship, earning a college scholarship, landing your dream job, or buying a house, you have to set your goal, formulate a plan, and then work your butt off to make it happen.

Over time, without you even noticing it, all of it is going to sink in. Take basketball, for example. You’re going to start seeing hoops as more than just a game. You’ll be more forward-looking, more strategic. It won’t just be a sport for you, it will become a vehicle for your education, for travel, for community. Through it all, and even to this day, you’ll keep one of your favorite Scriptures as your guiding light, the one Grandma Dolly says to you again and again, Luke 12:48: “To whom much is given, much is required.”

Then, one day, if you play your cards right, you’ll even get paid to play this game.

Then, one day, if you play your cards right, you’ll even get paid to play this game. Swin Cash

The funny thing is, it’s all going to start with a commercial.

In the spring of ’97, just a few months before you turn 18, you’ll catch a glimpse of something on television that will change everything. Instead of seeing AI or Shaq or MJ on the screen, you’ll turn on the TV and witness Rebecca Lobo, Lisa Leslie and Sheryl Swoopes hooping.

They’ll be in an empty arena, playing three-on-three for 30 seconds straight. Lisa passes to Rebecca, Rebecca goes in for a layup. They high five. In the background, Van Halen’s “Ain’t Talkin’ ’Bout Love” will be blaring. Everything about the commercial will be cool, but there’s this one thing in particular that will catch your eye. Once you see it, you won’t be able to forget it.

The backs of their jerseys will have LOBO, LESLIE and SWOOPES written on them. But when they turn to the camera, you’ll be able to see the letters “WNBA” written across the front.

Then, at the very end of the clip, it’ll be like BAM! In big, huge letters….

WE GOT NEXT!

It will mark the beginning of a new era. After that, basketball won’t just be about getting a scholarship anymore for you. It’ll be about making it to pros, the big time, right here in the United States.

From that point on, when you go to play with the boys at the YMCA, or down at the playground, everything will be different. Instead of just the guys talking about how far they can go in this sport, you’ll be able to talk about some big dreams, too.

And, as it turns out, it won’t just be talk. In 2002, you’ll back it up.

After leading the Huskies to an undefeated season as captain during your senior year at UConn, you’ll get drafted No. 2 overall by WNBA’s Detroit Shock. You’re going to be a professional basketball player, Swin. Honest to goodness. Can you believe it?

Basketball won’t just be about getting a scholarship anymore for you. It’ll be about making it to pros, the big time, right here in the United States.Swin Cash

There are going to be ups and downs, of course.

The ups will start right away. In your sophomore season, you’ll help lead the Shock to their first WNBA championship. That same season, you’ll play in the league’s All-Star Game. In 2004 you’ll win gold at the Olympics in Greece.

The downs? A herniated disc, a torn ACL, the loss of loved ones, a cancer scare … I could go on. But you’re going to take on each of these challenges with persistence and discipline. You’ll find purpose in the pain and fulfillment in the struggle. You’ll lean on your mom and her steadfast belief in you. You’ll ask the hard questions of your doctors and coaches. And you’ll do what you need to do. Grandma’s Scripture, “To whom much is given, much is required,” will carry you forward. You’ll understand, at the very core of your being, that everything you have, every accomplishment and responsibility, is a privilege.

You’ll fight through it all, and the success you’ll experience right out of the gate with the Shock won’t be beginner’s luck. You’ll win another WNBA Championship with them in 2006, and then get one in 2010 with the Seattle Storm. Two years later, you’ll return to the Olympic Games, this time in London. And once again, you’ll come home with gold.

But I’m not just here to tell you about all of your future accomplishments, as sweet as they will be. Here’s something that I want you to know … something I really want you to understand and take from this letter. In the coming years, you’re going to need to think big-picture.

In the coming years, you’re going to need to think big picture. Swin Cash

Playing in the W means basketball won’t just be your sport, it will be your career.

You’re going to need to be smart in order to get the most out of it. The day you get drafted, you’ll already need to start planning for life after basketball. The WNBA won’t be handing out multimillion-dollar checks. You’ll have to develop a plan, a strategy for how to make your money last. And grow.

And learning how to do that kind of planning, well ... it’s not something you’re going to be able to pick up on the playground or at the Y. It won’t be something that you and Mom talk about at the dinner table, either.

So let me help bring you up to speed. Here’s the main thing, Swin: It’s not as scary as it seems. Really, you got this.

And there’s a good reason why I say that — why I know it.

The things about you that allow you to excel on the basketball court are the exact same qualities you’ll draw on in figuring out things like investing and planning for retirement — drive, persistence, attention to detail, all of that stuff.

Don’t let a lack of knowledge stop you from doing what you need to do in order to learn. Just put in the work. Like always. Ask a lot of questions. Be proud of asking questions! And don’t forget about the “who.”

Build a team that you can rely on to help you figure all these things out. When you don’t understand something, or you’re curious, or need advice, find someone who has lots of experience in that area. There are going to be people out there who know their stuff and will want to help you. Just make sure you do your research. Make sure these people are legit. Treat this — building your financial team — like everything depends on it. Like it’s picking a college or deciding where to go in free agency. Dig in, find the best experts and then stay engaged.

Once you start doing that stuff, and really start figuring things out, you’re going to want to pass along what you know to others. Kind of like what I’m doing for you right now.

You’ll want others to get to the point where they aren’t feeling overwhelmed or confused when talking about financial topics. You’ll understand that regardless of their backgrounds or careers, no one should feel like they’re in the dark when it comes to their money. So do me a favor: Share the things you’ve been learning with young kids in the sport, and your future nieces and nephews — everyone you can, really.

And then, one day, you’ll get married and start a family of your own. Take everything you know, all that you’ve learned, and lay the foundation for these lessons with your kids early on. Teach your children about the benefits of planning and persistence and teamwork — just like Mom did with you. But also … teach them about money, budgeting, investing and saving. Have those conversations to help them feel confident and comfortable.

Then, one afternoon, when your five-year-old son runs up to you in Target with his Spider-Man wallet and says, “Hey Mommy, I have some money in here. I can buy this Hot Wheels web-car launcher,” you’ll know you’re doing something right.

You’ll have become someone your kids can look up to, and someone they can learn from. You’ll be someone they can trust to always be in their corner. Just like your mom and mentors were for you. 

Brought to you by Invesco QQQ in partnership with Invesco QQQ’s How Not To Suck At Money. Learn more at HNTSAM.com

All investments involve risks, including possible loss of principal. Individuals should consider their own situation and risk tolerance or consult a financial professional before making any investment decisions. The opinions expressed are those of Swin Cash and are based on her own personal experiences and should not be a guide for future success as other individuals’ experiences may not be representative of Swin Cash’s experiences. NCAA is a trademark of the National Collegiate Athletic Association. Invesco is not affiliated with the NCAA or any of the individuals, schools or professional associations or teams mentioned in this article. Invesco Distributors, Inc.

This article was originally published on www.theplayerstribune.com as Letter to My Younger Self .